One interesting thing about WordPress is that it comes with its own stats package … and I’m diggin’ it.

Past versions of Uncle Crappy have relied solely on a free counter provided by extremetracking.com, which does a nice job of tracking individual hits, page reloads, and as I’ve mentioned before, a whole bunch of neat stuff about who you are, where you visit from and what got you here.

A little more detail: I like that their counter package distinguishes between hits and reloads — which is the same visitor checking multiple pages during a single visit — and I always used to previous number to determine how many hits Uncle Crappy had received.

Because I liked the old counter package, I installed it here as well, even though WordPress automatically does it for you. So just for fun, I checked today to see how they compare.

Um, holy crap. In the seven days since I installed the extremetracking package here, it’s counted 100 hits, as of 1 p.m. today. In roughly the same time period, the WP counter has tallied 248 — TWO HUNDRED FORTY EIGHT — visits. And their counter doesn’t include me when I’m logged in.

Another example: ET says I got 29 hits on Wednesday, when most of you, directed from the Blogger page, visited here for the first time. According to WP, though, I got 76 hits on the same day.

I’ve always been impressed with bloggers who rack up a kazillion hits in roughly the same period of time it took me to collect 10,000 — we’re at 10,844 now, by the way — but now I wonder: are they using the extremely generous WP tracker when they total their numbers?

And the bigger question: Should I as well? World Domination could be a lot closer than I had expected…