I’ve gone and reclaimed the old Sitemeter counter I’d used on my Blogspot site. Had to reset it to zero and rebuild all my pages, and I’ll be taking a WAG as to my actual February numbers, and so on and etcetera. What can I say, I got what I paid for. Ultimately, I’ll probably add an Extreme Tracking and/or Add Free Stats counter just to compare and contrast, but for now I’m too lazy. (Thanks to Alan for the Add Free Stats suggestion.)
I had about 32,000 visits in January, making it slightly less busy than December but pretty decent overall. Jon Matthews and American Idol tryouts continue to be big search enine favorites – these two posts on Matthews have drawn a boatload of comments, mostly asking for updates, and I eventually closed comments on the American Idol post. Lea Fastow was popular last month, but the second most frequent search term and a consistent winner for some time now is “ugly people”, presumably because of my Show Business for Ugly People category. Who knew there was such interest?
Top referrers are below the More link. As always, thank you for coming by. I hope I can make a decent guess at February’s numbers.
Aggregators, collections, indices, etc ====================================== 298: http://www.bloglines.com 140: http://blo.gs/ 111: http://www.technorati.com/ 73: http://ranchero.com/software/netnewswire/ Weblog referrers ================ 1674: Atrios
1410: Daily Kos
656: Calpundit
548: TAPPED
369: Political State Report
198: The Burnt Orange Report 160: Rhetoric & Rhythm
144: Rob Booth
129: The Sideshow
96: A Perfectly Cromulent Blog
91: Slacktivist
90: Coffee Corner
87: The Agonist
83: Matthew Yglesias
81: Greg Wythe
79: Virginia Postrel
77: Liberal Oasis
Top search terms ================ #reqs: search term -----: ----------- 842: lea fastow 818: ugly people 499: american idol tryouts 332: jon matthews 241: william krar 235: andy pettite 226: diane zamora 150: costco 83: prime number algorithm 78: largest rat 72: capturing saddam 64: world's largest rat 54: darlie routier 53: poincare's conjecture 51: tom coleman 50: schlitterbahn galveston 44: marfreless 43: if you love something set it free 42: catholic high school girls in trouble 39: marnie rose
You’re using MT so obviously you’re on some host with CGI capability, I don’t understand why you don’t run your own internal stats software. I use AWStats, it’s wonderful. And it’s free. I’ve had great success migrating old AWStats data even to newly reformatted host computers.
I do use a counter provided by my host – that’s the number you see directly above the Blogstreet and Sitemeter logos at the bottom. It gives daily and monthly summaries, which is where I get the info cited in these posts. What it doesn’t give is running totals you can check during the day, like Sitemeter does. It also doesn’t always give a full link to a referrer, especially when the referrer is on a message board somewhere. In combination with Sitemeter, I get a pretty good overall picture, but I suppose there’s always room for improvement. I’ll definitely check AWStats this weekend.
Do you know how to dynamically capture SiteMeter data, so that you could put it somewhere else in your blog if you felt like it?
I believe you need a paid version of Sitemeter for that. I know you can get CSVs of your data with the paid version. The free version doesn’t have anything like that as far as I know.