Greetings, Readers!
For my 30th post (Yay, another "0" number, woo-hoo! - Actually, it really has nothing to do with that.) I thought I'd reflect on some stats that I've found interesting regarding my blog.
A couple days (maybe a week) after I started this blog, I ran across a site tracking tool called BlogPatrol. It's free, and gives you basic details about traffic to your site. Some items of interest are the "Top 20's" and "Last 10's", which they have for both Referrers (Sites with links to my blog that people cliked on.) and Search Tearms (Words people used on search engines that led them to my site.). Also provided is a breakdown of some basic computer information for the last 25 visitors (IP, Browser, OS, and Screen Resolution/Bit Depth).
I really don't much care who does or doesn't view this site, but it does fascinate me in a way to see what actually does happen to this page when I'm not looking. For instance, I can say with reasonable confidence that a large percentage of my visitors are running Internet Explorer 6, on a Windows XP machine, at 1024x768 resolution with 32bpp. Someone out there is running 1280x854x32 (Widescreen?) on a Mac. And some others are like me (and I am excluded from this listing, by the way) and like 1280x1024x32 on their WinXP machine under IE 6. The few Mac users that have stopped by are all running NN 7.x, and there's some oddball XP user running something called Opera 7.x. (Never heard of that one... maybe I should give it a whirl.)
IPs barely tell me a thing, except for a few people that I know of. Like, I can say "Hmm... that's a familiar domain, I wonder if so-and-so has stopped by?". Or "That's a local ISP, I wonder who I know nearby that's visited?". Which tells me my visitors like to tease and toy with my mind. I have one word for those... nyahh! :-P
What I find of particular interest is the Referrers/Search Terms lists. Most of my referrers are other BlogSpot blogs, probably via the handy-dandy little Blogger Bar up on the top of any BlogSpot site. That link all the way on the right will take you to another (random or recently updated?) blog that's linked to BlogSpot, and I can only assume that's the way I'm getting them listed as referrers to my site, since I don't know these people and I don't see my blog in any of their links lists. Aside from those, my next hottest referrer falls under the "Self-Referring/Bookmarker" category, which tells me that people actually do visit this link that I hand them once in awhile. Kinda nice to know. After this, things start to get interesting. My next hottest referrer, albeit unsurprisingly, is Jennifer Garrett's Blog. It's a pretty popular blog that I just started reading (Gotta remember to add her to my Links section), written by one of the editors at Blogger. She'd made a post one day regarding the new flavors of Mountain Dew popping up, and I made a comment to add Pitch Black to her list of Dew Mutations. Seems she was shocked enough to append that to her original post, and therefore now puts her on my "Top Referrers" list, and makes her the only specific one I can document that I did not intentionally genrate. (At least, not for this purpose.) So, thanks Jen!
The truly most intriguing thing I find, however, is the Search Terms list. So far, only 3 searches have hit my site. (Not that there's much traffic here anyway, but the searches themselves are interesting.) Two of them were through Yahoo!, one for "money for returning students" (don't ask me how Yahoo! found me that way), and the other for "green glass doors". The latter I find particularly interesting since the third search was through Dogpile, also for "green glass doors". After further research, I've found that the "money for returning studients" search actually picked me up due to a typo in one of my posts (accidentally added an "i" in "students") and then some remote connetions to the other terms throughout my other posts. As far as Yahoo's "green glass doors" results, I think the person must have had "valley" or something else in there when they did their search (the term itself has actually dropped off the list since it's been awhile, so I don't know exactly what it was, just that it was there and had something to do with those doors), because I can't find myself anywhere within the first five pages or so of Yahoo's "green glass doors" results. But for "money for returning studients" I'm number 12! (An error soon to be remedied, so I'll not link.) And, for the Dogpile "green glass doors" search, I'm number 10!
Just some interesting things I've noticed, and thought I'd blog.
- Iszi
In the Valley of the Green Glass Doors, there are puppies and kittens, but no dogs or cats. O.o
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Hey,,,Mr. Cheeky, watch it! Who are you calling "some oddball XP user running Opera 7x! It's me! LOL.....
Yes you should try Opera. It is excellent (so my friend who downloaded it for me says) especially when IE6 is giving so much concern with hackers and spywares.
Thank you for following me from Mikes page. Your input is appreciated. I will argue with some of the views at a later date.
I agree with you on meeting online subject.
Oh thank you for pointing me to BlogPatrol. I will give it a go. Good Night. B.
Hi, I did post a comment on here last night. What has happened to it?
I also tried the BlogPatrol. Thank you for that but can't seem to access it or modify the details.
Will talk later.
Heh... good to see you here, B. Was just stopping to check up on a few things on the way to bed and caught the e-mails with your comments and decided to reply.
As far as me trying Opera (or any other browser for that matter), I may just do that bud don't expect it to stick. There's two main reasons (albeit rather pathetic) that I stick with IE.
1.) Familiarity. This is what just about every Windows user in the world is "raised" on and I'm no exception. Yeah, I know you can make most other browsers look and feel like IE, but I'm just too lazy to sit through doing all the tweaks and stuff. (Yeah, I know... gotta work on that laziness thing. God, please help me!)
2.) Ease of install and access. The thing comes with Windows! How much easier can you get? Just install your OS, run the updates (which you have to do on install anyway) and boom, you're done! This came especially nice when I found myself habitually reformatting every three months if not more often. (And I'm really overdue for one now.)
As far as help for BlogPatroll, catch me on IM sometime (pretty sure it's listed in my profile) and I'll try to get you through it. Really isn't that hard IMHO.
Meanwhile, I need sleep. Been up since 2200 last night, and got to wake up again at 2100 tonight for work. And the rain outside isn't helping me keep consciousness either.
So, good night.
- Iszi
Hi, Thank you for your offer of help with blog etc. I will take it up when we both have free time. Hope the weather is not being unkind to Florida. Take care. Bye for now. Bav.
Post a Comment