More on Sitemeter

In the comments to the last post, QueerCincinnati.com asked about Sitemeter. I've been playing with it for about a week now, and I'm enthralled. It's free, and it gives me tons of information about who's coming to the site.

When I log in, this is what I see:


So right away, that's some pretty good info. And you can break that down in graph form.


But Sitemeter also pulls information about my individual visitors. Like, crazy amounts of data. Like what monitor resolution they have. (I can actually see how this would be helpful, depending on what you're trying to do with your site; you could scale your design up or down to fit the majority of your viewers' monitors.)

Also, you can pull up a world map that shows where all your visitors come from. This is the most fun part.


The cursor disappeared when I took the screenshot, but what's happening is that I'm mousing over a little green dot on the eastern edge of China, which causes a white box to pop up with the viewer's server and location.

So if I click on that visitor from T'ai-pei, I discover that he found this old post on a Google search for "something told the wild geese" (OK, wow, that post is the #1 hit for that search in Google Taiwan!) and stayed for 0 seconds. Guess he didn't find what he was looking for. Also, he was using IE 7.0 on a Windows NT machine.

Anyway, that's Sitemeter. Can you see why I love it so far?

UPDATE. Sorry, I forgot to mention my one problem with Sitemeter: as far as I know, it doesn't track RSS subscribers. (Or if it does, it doesn't distinguish them from regular visitors.) Anyone know more about this?

The blog ... of TOMORROW!

This weekend I decided to finally install the Sitemeter code I signed up for like three months ago, which led to me upgrading to Blogger's new templates. Let me know if anything looks weird to you, and I'll try to fix it - I already had to poke around in the HTML to keep the end of the post from butting up against the date below it.

Hello again, Twitter

After a concerted effort to update at Twitter whenever I think of it, I've decided to add my Twitter feed back to my sidebar.

The key to Twitter, I think, is seeing it not as a mini-blog but as a communication tool for friends. Don't you want to know what your friends are doing, right this second? Well, don't you? Are you a bad friend or something?

Also, the ability to update easily via text message is attractive; it means that I'll be able to post little life updates from my vacation in New Jersey next week so you won't go insane from Kelly deprivation. (The DSM IV lists it as treatable only with the regular application of Gina, which works as a kind of Kelly methadone.)

JUSTICE has a new look ...

Wow, The Blogroll of JUSTICE! was out of date - I didn't even have Kari's shopping blog on it, and that's like a year old, I think.

Anyway, I cleaned it out, deleted some links to stuff I don't really read anymore or that hasn't been updated in forever (as AE pointed out, this does NOT include Waiterrant), and added some blogs that have found their way into my reader recently.

(P.S. Note to newly-linked local bloggers: please do not feel obligated to blogroll me. I don't really go in for the whole "you link me, and I'll link you, and then each of our blogrolls will include 800 links to blogs we don't actually read" thing. I just link to blogs I like.)

Test post with Camino ...

... and ... it's letting me use Compose mode! Score one for Camino!

Shiira does not seem to have Compose power at this time. Too bad - it's rather pretty, plus it does the RSS thang.

UPDATE: And where, may I ask, is the RSS thang on Camino? Grr - I'm right back where I started. Camino 1, Shiira 1.

Queen Blogopopolis

I've finally gotten around to updating my blogroll - because I know you were all waiting for it.

You can see under "My Other Blogs" I've added Popography, where I mostly just crab about how Gilmore Girls has totally gone downhill this season. You might like the stuff the other people are posting, though.

WireCan has been added to Local Blogs. I've fixed the link to Josh's blog in Friends and updated the Other blogs to reflect what I've been reading these days. I've gotten rid of the links to my MySpace, etc. pages and (finally) added a link to the weekly comic Mr. Wufflekins draws.

Many of the blogs on this roll have got some awesome stuff up right now. Allow me to direct your attention to:
- Carrie and Eileen, who just got back from a trip to England and have recapped the experience. Who knew so many people jumped in front of Underground trains?
- Ronson, who's working on a "Top 25 Songs of 2006" list. Go see if you've heard of more than, like, eight of them.
- Gina, who's got a sweet video of her fun evening at the Pop Rocked opening reception.

Blog test

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