Blogging in the Space Age

Okay, I have spent too much time futzing with things this week. First, you will notice my fancy new sidebar. I took out most of the link lists that were there and replaced them with RSS feeds to those sites instead. This is nice because it's linked to my own RSS feeder, so all I have to do is add something to that and it'll start showing up here. I might change it around a bit to not show every new post -- a lot of the posts are just things another feed I've got there posted. We shall see. One of the RSS feeds are the last five songs I listened to on my computer, and the link will take you to my last.fm profile in case you really want to know what I've been listening to. You'll also notice most of my links aren't in list format anymore; it's not as easy to read each thing now, but you shouldn't have to scroll two miles down like before.

Another thing I did behind the scenes was to sign up for Google Analytics to track visitor data. I don't get much info from you, don't worry -- just whether a visitor has been here before, what site referred them, and geographically where they are. No IP addresses or anything like that. It's amazingly cool seeing this data, even though I had *cough* seven hits this week. (Actually, probably one or two more; it can't see you if you've got something to block the google-analytics.com script on the page.)

But here's what's cool about these seven hits: I don't think they're all immediate friends or family. I had one visit from Northampton, which I assume is Jess. Two of the other hits were from cities in the Hudson valley, so probably friends or family. A visit came from Cantonment, Florida, but I know about a dozen people in that state and have no idea if any of them live near there; another from Vancouver, where I don't think I know anyone. One came from outside of London, and another from Santo António da Charneca in Portugal. But then, I don't know how precise this is. I doubt the locations I'm getting are where the actual visitors are; probably just the location of their ISP or some major server, which means it's probably got a margin of error of at least twenty miles or so.

Looking at the referrers, three came straight to the site, not through links. One clicked through from Jess's blog, but on a different day than the Northampton visit -- so Jess, that means you account for about a third of my traffic, good job! One of the others was from Blogger, so probably someone clicking 'next blog'; the other two from Google, searching for info about kronosaurs. I'm guessing those links were the ones who checked out my posts on 'biology' and 'school'. Hmm, well, I hope they found it interesting, if nothing else; it's not like I'm anything close to a credible academic source.

I knew I should have written more about kronosaurs... did I mentioned that the skeleton in that picture was completed wrong? They guessed, incorrectly, how many vertebrae it should have. That could go in an essay, but be sure to attribute me, in whatever format is appropriate for a fourth-hand source who's only even seen the skeleton a couple times.

It's definitely neat to know that people are reading this, even if it's accidentally. Maybe next week I'll have repeat visitors, if I haven't scared them all away with my reverse-stalking. If you are one, drop a comment and let me know you're reading. My ego will appreciate it.