How to tell how many hits or visits or if ANY????

Install the stats plugin of your choice.

If you already have a WordPress.com account (for using Akismet) then try installing WordPress.com Stats. It’s not perfect but you can’t beat the price and it will show you how many people are hitting your blog and what they are reading.

In addition to WordPress.com Stats plugin, you can install, Google Analytics, or subscribe to web services viz. Sitemeter.

If you want more interesting way to track your visitors, read about Woopra. Give it a try.

I use WP Stats, Google Analytics, and Feedburner stats, and I get completely different results from each of them everyday. Does anyone know which one paints the most accurate picture?

None of them are going to be totally accurate.

IMHO Google Analytics and Sitemeter happens to be the best and their counting range aren’t so far apart.

Disadvantage with GA is that it’s not a live update and you’ll have to wait a few hours or so to get an update of something that happen xxx hours ago.

Sitemeter is real time so it’s a little more close to accurate.

Most of these stats program have their own policies in place on what to count as hits, pageviews, and all the other terminology they can come up with.

Computers with javascript disabled probably won’t count as hits towards GA and sitemeter.

What about the difference between actual visits to the site versus folks who read rss feeds? Feedburner breaks this out but the others don’t.

I use Statcounter. Have for a half dozen years. The basic, which works great, is free. It will show everything. Hell I wouldn’t use anything else.