KDawson

Here are about 6 hours of the server log from the time the post went up: [ https://dawson.nu/misc/sah-log.txt ]. The post’s ID on the site is /prophylactics-therapeutics-and-astrazeneca/ and there are 77 GET requests for it in this time. Jetpack stats showed 3 visits by the end of this period. (The log has been edited to remove requests from my IP own address and that of the server itself, mostly WordPress plugins’ housekeeping.)

Understand. The numbers still do not come close to adding up. Example: I put up a new post about 6 hours ago and according to my log file, 98 requests for “GET /new-post-title…” have been served, of which 60 came from unique IP addresses. Does Jetpack perhaps throw out hits from Twitter and Facebook? There are 58 of those out of the 98. Each one represents a click from a friend / follower responding to my posting of the new post’s URL on those platforms.

Given all of the above, how many visits does Jetpack report for the new blog post?

3.

If this all sounds to you like it might represent some sort of problem, I will be happy to share log files with the Jetpack team.

No answers here, solved it myself. Thought I’d post the solution in case anyone searches for the problem in future.

Instead of displaying the most recent three posts one per widget on the front page, I made a child theme and edited sidebar-home.php to include only a single widget, not three. Made it full width by applying class col-940.

In Appearance > Widgets > Home Widget 1, I added the Recent Post widget and set it to display 3 posts.

Then in the child theme’s style.css I added a rule for .widget_recent_entries li (the three recent post links are displayed in an unordered list inside a div with this class):

.widget_recent_entries li {<br />
	display: block;<br />
	width: 32%;<br />
	float: left;<br />
}

Now the three list items (recent posts) display three-across inside the single front-page widget. A little judicious tinkering with margins and width in the above CSS code assures that the solution works responsively on all displays.