Techno Geekery
(jaylee, you can stop reading right now as I know this will bore you to tears)
Let’s talk a little technical stuff. First of all I’m using copious amounts of bandwidth and frankly I’m not sure why, or what bandwidth really is. Any takers?
When I left the old blog behind in favor of the new one, I really changed my approach to blogging and my purpose. My goal was to make numbers and comments not really matter (but really, I love when you guys leave me comments, I get warm fuzzies). However, I really don’t check my stats that often, I checked them today for the second time- ever. I wanted the blog to be more authentic and less contrived, I wanted to accentuate the positive and beautiful in my life- not whine about how motherhood was/is hard (because I think we all know that).
So when I checked my stats today I realized that I don’t really know what I am looking at. My domain host offers some excellent stats software built into my Cpanel, but I really don’t understand it. What is the difference between “number of unique visitors”, “pages” & “hits”? From the little I googled I think that the “hits” number should be ignored as anytime anything is called off the server it gets a hit (so a hit appears anytime my header banner is pulled from the server etc.). Also, what are good stats? How many “page views” a day is considered good? When will the crafty marketers start calling?
One feature I love about my stats is the refers page, I love seeing where you come from to get here. I also love seeing which pages/posts get the most hits. I noticed that a high number of you subscribe to the comments feed. Does that mean you would prefer to hear back from me via the comments section? Since WP emails me your comments I’ve just been replying back to you in that fashion, should I reply back via the comments?
Here is a shot I took this evening. I took the kids to the nearby greenbelt to kick around a soccer ball (you know, because the whole motherhood thing is hard and they were driving me crazy) and ended up playing with my camera’s weak macro feature.
March 18th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Hi Heather. I subscribe to your feed but I don’t think I’m subscribed to the comment feed. I like getting the emails from you.
March 18th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
You are correct. Hits are to be ignored because they include bots and spiders that crawl the internet for Google and such.
You want to look at absolute unique visitors and Page views The “Absolute” means that they are being counted ONCE with no repeat visits in a set amount of time. (My stats have separate stats for returning visitors). Pageviews are just that…How many times a page has been loaded. So, one view at the blog post, and if they click to look at comments it would be 2 page views, etc.
I don’t check my stats nearly as much as I used to. It can make me feel too competative and sometimes just grody about blogging.
Still, some of it is really fun. I love seeing how people find me.
March 19th, 2008 at 6:51 am
Yeah. What Loralee said!
March 19th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
You lost me at bandwidth.