ilovecode

Anyone who is a website owner or who has a blog has to admit they like to watch their stats. We like to see how many people come and read what we have to say. It’s fun to watch those trends over a period of time. We LOVE it when people comment. It’s nice to have that conversation started.

This week I installed a cool little plugin that lets you watch the activity on your site. It’s a pretty neat idea and it can be addictive if your site is active enough.

This site basically watches to see who is reading your blog and what they are reading…LIVE. Sean Hickey released the latest version of this plugin a few days ago and I think it is a pretty solid effort.

Here is a screenshot:

At the top of the picture you see a legend of sorts that explains the symbols shown in the grid. The large gray box underneath shows activity. This graph resets itself everytime you load the plugin so unfortunately I don’t have a very good picture to show you here.

The grid is where all of he fun takes place. The first column lets you know if someone is looking at your page through their browser, a feed reader, or if they left a comment. If they left a comment you can click on the image and it will take you to that comment. The next column tells you what page they were looking at followed by the referrer. The last column tells you who is looking at your page.. well it tells you their IP address. if you want to see who, just click the IP and it takes you to a whois report on that IP.

Download the Live wordpress plugin for yourself!

De-lurking week is officially upon us! There are a lot of people who stumble upon this blog through search engines or who read it through their feed readers. Now is the time to just say hi and let me know who you are! Be a stranger no more and make yourself known!

If you are a long-time reader, give me a comment too! I want to see who is still alive out there… (cough owen, olly cough)

Come on….Don’t be shy

Performacing has decided to nix the deal with PayPerPost and will offer their blog statistics software, metrics, as open source. Nick Wilson has even recommended that if you don’t want to wait for an OS version of the software, you go checkout FeedBurner’s new stats (which I have just installed).

There is a lot of mixed reviews on the deal between Performacing and PayPerPost and the fact that it fell through. PayPerPost wanted to acquire Performacing which would give it access to their database of more than 28k subscribers. The Performacing community was pretty upset about this as there is alot of controversy surrounding blogging an PayPerPost. In the end though, it looks like Performacing chose to side with their community and while it won’t affect their wallet quite as soon as the PayPerPost deal would have, they have even more loyalty which I think will pay off over time.

A big thing I was wondering was, what would happen to Performacing for Firefox. I love this little extension and didn’t want to see it go away. Instead, it got it’s own little name: ScribeFire. If you’re a blogger and you haven’t used this extension, I highly recommend it, especially if you have more than one blog.

De-lurking week was started I think by Papernapkin but essentially its a day for all of those readers to come out of the shadows and say hi!

Bloggers like to receive comments and sometimes when people don’t comment you wonder… did that post suck? Did anyone really care? Quite often, I’m afraid, that is the case. But, sometimes, it may just be that the reader enjoyed your post, but didn’t have anything to say. Well, this is their opportunity. I am interested to know who reads my blog and what they do. How many of you are repeat offenders and how many just happened by the blog. Either way say hi.. even if you are a frequent commenter.

I was adding something to my sidebar today and I noticed some things that I had in it (calendar, etc) that I really didn’t think got used. This got me thinking about all of the blogs I visit and how sometimes their sidebars scroll 4 pages :S

As blogs age, it seems they put on a little unnecessary weight and their sidebars just grow! Let’s make today the “Clean your sidebar Day” get rid of anything that you really don’t want or need there!

If you did it, post a link to your site in the comments (free linkage :D