Monday 15 September 2008

Something's wrong with Site Meter

Up until recently, Site Meter had been providing a valuable service for this blog. Due to a widgity type thing inserted into my blog I could track who had visited my blog: when, where from, and most importantly of all, for how long. The duration element was important to me as it helped me distinguish between those who accidentally came across my blog and then left in the blink of an eye, and those who actually take time to read what I post. Well, my ability to sift through "hits" in terms of their duration has been removed, due to their snazzy new upgrade which makes the service no longer serviceable.

Worse - and being a technological numpty I have no idea why - shortly after I had installed their new JavaScript code, my webpage kept "disappearing." I'd get a glimpse for a few minutes and then I'd be redirected to a Dell site and be told my page was inaccessible. Luckily, I managed to get into my layout page before being redirected again and have now throroughly expunged my blog of any link to Site Meter. Perhaps Statcounter will do a better job, though to be honest I preferred the old Site Meter.

And while I'm complaining about such things (what is the generic term?), what's up with technorati? I've been linked to numerous times, yet the site has hardly registered anything. This isn't a issue of me wanting to boost my rating, it's a matter of wanting to stay up to date on who's reading and publicising me (or demonizing, but I have to say that hasn't happened yet. Unfortunately. I do like a good debate).

4 comments:

Esteban Vázquez said...

Well, I didn't change my SiteMeter code, and as far as I can tell mine still works! StatCounter is actually very good, and for some reason it identifies IP locations that SiteMeter misses (but maybe this is part of what the new SiteMeter corrects?).

As for Technorati, I have no idea. Mine will show no new links for weeks at a time, and then show several at once. It's maddening! I do suppose, however, that this has something to do with how often blog authors "ping" their blogs.

Phil Sumpter said...

Well, I think it's good that I don't have the link anymore. To be honest, I was wasting a lot of time looking at how much time was spent on it and from where.

By the way, what's a "ping"?

Esteban Vázquez said...

Well, I was obsessed with it for a minute, but I've settled into checking it every other day or so to see how people find my blog, what's most interesting to folks, etc. No harm done! :-)

And "ping" is a term for the olden days of the internet. In Technorati world, it's what the site does when it checks your blog to pick up new posts, or conversely, what your blog does to alert Technorati that a new post is up. Blogger should do it automatically, but you have to have to setting enabled. I think some people don't, and other systems might not do it automatically either, so if the authors don't alert the site by clicking on "ping", then it can be weeks before Technorati does it automatically.

Phil Sumpter said...

Oh, thank you very much. I will just have to trust my blog to the technological sophistication of Blogger then. Cheers for the info.