Friday, December 02, 2005

Hi Everybody!

We're almost to the end of our first week with StatCounter.com tracking our site statistics. I dropped NedStat last Sunday because they now use pop-up advertising to keep themselves going. I would have liked to at least been given the choice to move to a full account or quit, but if notice was sent out, I missed it.

In contrast, StatCounter is refreshingly up front. They explain what the lower limits are of their free service so you have reasonable expectations about how much service you will be getting for free and at what volumes of traffic it would be appropriate to upgrade or quit the free service. I have been very impressed so far because the information they provide for free is much more detailed than with NedStat.

There's quite a few different types of statistics, but here's a good example of what I mean. I can now get statistics on which countries, state / region, cities, and ISP's our visitors are coming from. Nedstat offered continental, country, and some city stats, but that was it.


(With all the talk of visitors from all over, I thought I'd put up some pure Canadiana for you ex-pats.)

This week we've averaged around 50 unique visitors a day. Around 20 of those are return visits. Overall, each day, you loaded our pages up around 80 times. I had no idea we had such a steady following. If the M's were older, they'd be flattered if I told them.

It's no surprise, but most of you are coming from the U.S. and Canada. What is interesting is we've also had visits from Hong Kong, Hungary, Chile, Finland, the UK, Singapore, Australia, and more. The logs show that some of you are Gail's friends who drop in from her blog every so often. However, there are visits from other places with no referring URL, which may indicate that you've bookmarked us.

In the last 30 hours or so, we've had 12 visitors from California, 11 from Maine, 9 from New York, 7 from Ontario (hi Jamie and Melissa!), and the list goes on. There's someone from PEI who has been a regular visitor all week, and I can't for the life of me think of who you are. Hi from the Left Coast!

One of our visitors has their ISP in Reston, VA. I haven't figure out who that is either (I'm betting it's a Harrold relation), but howdy to you too!

Yesterday the 'Came From' list came up with quite a few visitors referred by the December newsletter for ChoosingHome.com. I know our blog is listed there, but I wasn't sure what the spike was all about. It turns out that we were randomly picked as one of the 3 blogs highlighted for the month. Looking back through the logs, there's folks who read ChoosingHome in Budapest.

Anyhow, it's getting late, and I've managed to NOT get to bed before midnight every single night this week. For a morning person, that's not a good thing.

One more thought before I go: a few years ago, I ran an online 'treasure hunt' based on the 12 Days of Christmas for family. That was waaaaaay back when we were on dial-up and using GeoCities. I'm planning on doing it again this year. The neat part is that we will have over 400 entries on our blog that I can hide the 'treasures' in. All I can say is, get ready for more silly riddles and cryptic clues.

Happy holidays to you all!

2 comments:

Gail at Large said...

Safari, surprisingly, has a more effective pop-up blocker than Firefox (for Mac, at least). I don't have any pop-up ads for Blogger/Blogspot or Nedstats (now Webstats4U). I'm pretty sure it's a European company, or started out that way, which explains why they don't have state-by-state details. They used to have little or no advertising, but it looks like they've gone the way of most growing internet companies -- revenue through advertising. Actually, Flickr is the same way -- free accounts have ads, but aren't nearly as obnoxious.

By the way, did I ever mention I used an HTML editor for Blogger when I had a PC, called wbloggar? Check it out:

http://wbloggar.com/

They don't make a Mac version, which is too bad, because I had the app customise tags exactly how I wanted, and it meant I never had to use Blogger to compose/edit posts unless I was on a remote machine.

A friend mentioned that Blogspot sites screw up on Firefox. I'm sure they'll also come up with new ways to get around pop-up blockers, so I decided to move over to a domain. It's not set up yet, it'll probably take me all of December to finish. I have 1086 posts as of yesterday on Blogger, so maybe January, or February, or 2007 is a more reasonable expectation.

David said on Airliners.net the advertisers are using sound, so even if you block their pop-up ads, you're forced to hear them. ARGH!

LarryandJean said...

Interesting. Now that you've posted this, I suspect that GMP will be urging me to find the time to following statistics on our blogs. I'm sure that without the drama that accompanies your household to follow the traffic is considerably less.

OC