and so we begin counting

Our last task for MPI104 was to look into counters for our blogs. Now why would a counter be useful, simply to know whether or not your blog is popular. If you have a high hit number then clearly your blog is popular and must be an interesting read to people out there, and if sadly you have quite a low number then maybe your blog isn't doing quite so well and the counter might be a wake up call to be more creative or interesting.

Is there anything you would like to know about who visits your blog? the answer yes. what type of people eg. are my blogs reaching my intended audiences and are the visitors people I don't like who are checking out their competition...

So way back in last term I put a counter on my blog and it was increasing slowly but steadily though the look of the counter itself I've never been happy with as it always sat vertically rather than horizontlly and looked a little silly so I have now rectified that. The counter I was using was from the website 100% Free Counters, the list of 50 things we needed to do for the last assesment had counter on there so I just went to google typed in counters and took the first option (in hind sight probably should have looked around a little bit more).
Anyway I have changed my counter to be the one from Sitemeter and as I my old counter was already at 138 hits I decided to make my starting number that on the sitemeter counter, even though the stats will go from zero.

As I haven't had this counter very long I have no idea where the hits come from or how they are referred to my site nor where do they come from, whether google refers them or how long they stay. Though I feel that in the future these statistics will be very interesting to look at and will help me improve my blog.

So with my Flickr account I can tell how many views each of my photo's has had (other then my own) but it doesn't tell me who the visitors were, though if some one leaves a comment on a photo it tells me who left it and put there display pic up as well so obviously that tells me they were a visitor. On Flickr I can also see if any of my images have been saved as favourite as well as who saved them as a favourite!
I can also see recent activity with my photos for up to a month which is cool!

With Del.icio.us you can see down the side of your page who has added you to their network so they are clearly visitors. Also sites saved by other people especially for you would indicate they are a visitor as they know the types of sites you are interested in! Otherwise I can't really see any other way of knowing if someone has visited my delicious account or not.

I will keep trying to learn more about my visitors but for the mean time I feel I have fulfilled this task.

Peace out!

P.S. for anyone interested my Technorati Authority is now: 14 and my Rank is: 381,304 YAY for me!