Visits, search engines, readers, and spiders. Oh my!

Last night I installed a new plugin that is supposed to track visitors, search engine hits, search engine spiders, and lots of other useless information that’s only of interest to me probably.

Well, I just checked it and it shows some cool information (it’s cool to me anyway).

To begin, somebody else is searching for me. My name anyway. I know, there are other people with the same name, but it’s just weird to see another search for “me”.

Search engines seem to like me, especially Yahoo. They hit my site 81 times over the course of today. Google was right behind, and MSN brought up the rear. The good news for me is that I am the top result on all of the engines. In real-world terms it doesn’t mean much, but personally I enjoy it.

Another stat that I find cool is that I do have ~140 unique visitors. That confirms the information I was getting from the server at my hosting provider. I enjoyed thinking that there were so many people reading the junk I put on here, but I was never fully trusting. Now, I have verification.

Generally, though, my totals for any one month keep maxing out at about 2100 unique visitors. If everyone gave $1/month, I could do this for a living and probably get more and better content. I had never thought about it like that, but the math is there. Think about it, loyal readers.

😉

Unfortunately, 90% of you are using Windows while viewing my site. I don’t hate Windows, but I do think people should check out the alternatives. Heck, even try a Mac if it turns your crank. Just don’t give up the freedom of choice to Microsoft and Billy Gates.

Some of you may have noticed posts titled “Dan’s Twitter Updates for xxxxx”. Those are short little updates done from my phone via text message. Twitter is a nifty website/service where people and their friends can send one text to Twitter and have it go to everyone who subscribes to their updates. It’s convenient because you can know what your friends are doing and they can know what you’re up to lately. It was really designed for interesting people and club-types, but it’s useful.

Finally, I would like to plead with you loyal readers to subscribe to my RSS feed however is convenient for you. For all of you there is the benefit of it automatically pulling down the feed so you don’t have to come to my site, and it helps me show that people are regularly reading my material. Plus, when you use an RSS reader you can subscribe to a whole bunch of feeds and categorize them so you can track every one without having to go to each site to check for new stories or articles.