For those of you who don't have blogs, or maybe you do and you don't use blogger, I will tell you a little bit about the stats page. Every blog owner has one, and it shows you how many people have looked at your blog by the day, week, month, or "all-time." It shows you which page(s) people looked at and how often. And although there's no identifying information to tell you who they are, there is a list of "sources"-- which tells you where your readers clicked from. Ouch, that is scarily bad grammar but I can't think of another way to say it.
A few of my regular readers use blind sites-- in other words, it's some fake site that shows up in the list of sources, used by someone who wants to surf the web anonymously. I think you can get software to do this for you. I don't mind this at all, of course-- I'm just grateful when anybody gets here. But since they seem to get here pretty regularly, I think of them as friends. Oh, it's the PHDonline.com guy. Or my teethwhitening.com buddy.
And then there are those of you who click when I tweet that I have a new post, or who come from one of my friends who have me listed on their blogroll. And a few get here through Google searches. All of those never add up to the total number of pageviews, though, so my hypothesis is that if you click from a bookmark, it doesn't register as a source.
Anyway. I lost one of my regular readers several months ago. I don't know for sure who it was, of course, just that the clicks came from one of my favorite blogs. I'm pretty sure it was over the gay ordination issue. I am entirely in favor of gay ordination; since I am a regular reader of this source blog, I suspect this particular reader is far more conservative than I am. I probably finally got a little to far out there for her (him).
If I had 50 or 100 readers, I wouldn't even have noticed. but I think of you guys as my merry little band, and I have to admit that this one has bothered me. She's (he's) gone now, so I don't suppose it makes much difference at this point, but it has spooked me a little about posting on controversial issues. Hence, my concern about being too flippant yesterday. I can't plan my posts around pleasing everybody, of course-- and since I've got the full range of liberal-to-conservative readers, there's no way I could please you all with every single post anyway. But I do think about this, sometimes quite a bit. Sometimes too much. There was a time when I would only let myself check the stats page once a month, so I wouldn't obsess about it. But now Blogger has basic stats built into the home page, so there's no avoiding it.
I guess I don't have a point today, this is just what I was thinking about when I sat down. If any of you are more tech savvy than I am, and can explain how anonymous surfing, or bots, or anything else about the sources works, please chime in.
I believe this would be one of the boring ones. ha.
May I begin by saying thank you?! You didn't have a specific topic either!!! Whew, I adore it when you help me to feel like part of a lovely group. Lol, some days we simply post what is on our minds.
ReplyDeleteNow, here's my whine du jour.... my super tech savvy kid (and her equally super tech savvy boyfriend) promised me that they could get Google Analytics installed for my birthday. Wrong. They couldn't. I am bereft. I obsess over those numbers WAY too much, and this would have probably just been gas on an already out of control fire. But still. I wanted it.
We all do this. Don't worry about it. Well, or don't worry about it MORE than you already are. ;)
Julie
This is YOUR blog. You must write to suit yourself, saying what you think and feel if that is your wish. If you say something that someone else objects to and they decide to leave it is their loss. I might not always agree with you (the gay ordination would be one topic for sure) but I am a big girl and I can take some disagreement. Someone who leaves over something you have written ON YOUR OWN BLOG should just put on their Big Girl panties and get over it.
ReplyDeleteGetting off soapbox now.
And I know what you mean about losing a follower when you don't have a bazillion of them to lose in the first place. You feel the lose more.
@Julie-- OK, I have to admit I am torn between curiosity about google analytics and what it could tell me, and horror that there is something that could give me MORE info, since what I have is already too much. If you get it worked out, you'll have to tell me about it.
ReplyDelete@Debbie-- yes, I knew you would disagree with me on that one (as well as others), and can I just say how much I appreciate it that you DIDN'T quit reading. Love you, girlfriend! For how many years now?? 45? 47?
Also-- I read back over this post and realized that I edited out a couple of paragraphs to make it less boring, but then didn't change the ending, where I referred back to the paragraphs I deleted. So anyway-- what I said was that it seems we all agree on which of my posts are boring, since the ones I think are boring usually get less than half the pageviews of the ones I think are interesting. Hence the line at the end-- "This is one of the boring ones." :-) There was also a bit where I wondered about bots that got cut, which is why I was asking for more info about them at the end. Sorry about the spaceout there.
ReplyDeleteDon't know how to do that either. I just use the world map thingy, moderate the spam comment folder and hope no nefarious people are reading. Interesting who is and who isn't visiting by the map.
ReplyDeleteThis is your blog, therefore you get the final word.