November 18th, 2008

Intra-blog Naval Gazing

I’ve had a site-metre thingy hooked up for a while for Rose-coloured, but I don’t get much use out of it. I don’t know if it’s a hard to intuit one or I’m just lazy (I suspect the latter, but it’s Google Analytics, so you can check it out and judge for yourself) but I find it hard to learn anything useful from it. Or maybe there’s nothing useful to learn from a site metre except for the number of people who look at this site every day. And GA *does* tell me that, with a helpful day-by-day line graph. I am pleased to note that in recent months there are more people reading this site than I have personally discussed the material with, which would be the point of having a blog in the first place. So we are moving in the right direction.

Hello new friends, anyway.

Sometimes, when I get ambitious (read: bored) I try the more advanced site tracking features, like the shaded map. From the varying shades of green, I now know that people in Sweden and Belgium have read this blog, which is puzzling, but hello to both of you anyway. I have also learned which sites link to mine, which I already knew, except for the one with “p*rn” in the title, which I refuse to click on to discover the connection. We shall let that remain a mystery.

And, after much skidding around the GA site, I figured out how to find out what people Google to get Rose-coloured (I have done this before, every six months or so, but then I forget how again). I know this is often very entertaining for bloggers, as people somehow wind up on lit-type blogs after searching “emo chicken gargoyle” or something equally inexplicable (and bound for disappointment on a lit-type blog). Less interestingly, but more profitably, readers of Rose-coloured generally search some combination of my name and the title of my book, or sometimes other authors that I have mentioned here. In fact, in the top 50 searches, there is only one that is funny, and that’s a sort of sad one:

infected ink pen puncture

because I made a joke about that once, and I am sure the person who wanted info on that subject was not kidding. I am sorry, whoever you are, that I was flip about something that would be a serious problem if it actually happened. I hope that it is not very badly infected.

If something needs to be changed/now is the time to change it
RR