Techie Talk Thursday

Ok so maybe I'm behind and everyone else out there already knows about this, but I am so excited to find a fun new toy. Now for anyone who does not have their own webpage you probably want to skip this post unless you are having trouble getting to sleep... or are looking for more ways to be paranoid about being stalked online...

So I feel bad for once again hyping a google product, so please forgive me and I promise once I start researching msft products I'll add them too. In the meantime I'm just doing research on our competitors ;) You see it all started with my desire to add a simple site counter to my blog. Turns out blogger.com doesn't have a good template for one, but they did have several suggestions for free versions out on the web, so off I sent exploring. Most of them required you to setup an account and although they were free, I try to at least minimize the amount of times I put all of my info out there and add more junk mail to my inbox...and thus my google find. Since I already have gmail account I gave it a shot. All I had to do was add some simple hidden HTML to my page and I was done.

It's been about a month and I decided to log back in and check out the analytics reports. WOW!!!! I am so impressed! Not only does it tell you how many hits you've had, it breaks it down by day, by length of time on site and number of pages within the site visited, AND by country, city, and state!!! Furthermore you can see exactly how the traffic was directed to your site such as my google gadget, a direct link, boredomtech.net, or a search engine - which is further broken down by exactly what was typed in the search box to get to your site!!! How cool is that?!?!?!? I know it's a bit big brother but it's super fun too. I was thinking about dad's church site and how you could use the analytics to see the most visited/therefore potentially most important pages on the site, how to expand your audience by researching the traffic origination, etc. Plus I got to find out there is some city out there called "Earth City" in the midwest and that someone there actually looked at my site!! There are also lots of pretty charts and graphs and knowing my love of those, well I was entertained for all morning. As an example I have pasted my GA traffic map is on the right. So fun!!!

Now I hope this won't preventing any of you secret readers from visiting - you can just block your IP address and I promise I won't be able to see you ;)

Ok now finally I'll end on a fun msft tool - maps.live.com, enter in your address (or mine!) and choose the birds eye view. Way cooler than google's satellite view!! (although live has that too...)

So I've got to go back to work - now you all can go enjoy your first tech thursday!!