This is the first of a series of posts about items that any good TellPeoria or Blog Peoria Project blogger ought to have in his or her sidebar.
TellPeoria bloggers are supposed to be running at Star Counter in your sidebars. Because it’s the same code on all sites, this lets us track hits and visits and all sorts of statistics on sites on multiple platforms and domains.
But Stat Counter doesn’t really track stats for individual blogs.
So member bloggers really ought to be running their own tracking code.
We recommend Site Meter. It’s free, easy to use and gives users a pretty good idea of who is visiting your blog, how many of them there are and why they are coming.
When you sign up, choose the free version. You will end up with a username that looks something like “s45yourusername.” They will send you an auto-generated password. One of the first thing you do after you get signed in will be to click on “manager” at the top of the page and change your password to something you can easily remember. You will hardly ever need to log into Sitemeter and it’s easy to lose track of the passwords this way. You will always be able to track your username because it’s part of the code you end up pasting into a text widget in your sidebar.
Here are some common settings you might want to change from the defaults. You can change the appearance of the badge. I pick on that is rather large, the default is too skinny for my taste. I do not choose a badge that displays the number of hits. The point of a hit counter isn’t to measure the total number of visitors to your site, but how many visit every day, week and month and where they came from.
I do not change the “starting count.” I leave it at zero and start measuring from the date the code is added. It’s more honest that way. Also, chose the “ignore visits” so it does not count visits from my home computer. Again, it’s more honest.
I set “privacy level” at normal. This way visitors can click on the badge and see your stats. It’s more transparent, and citizen journalism is supposed to be transparent.
And there’s a way to tell Sitemeter where you’re located. Clock on “site location” and enter the latitude (40.74) and longitude (-89.61). This helps Sitemeter track how many visitors are your neighbors.
You can fiddle around with other settings, but I don’t recommend it.
At this point, you can click on “HMTL code” and copy the code you pick and paste it into a text widget. Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets.
Again, if you want to be able to click on your badge and see all the delicious statistics, you should pick the” Site Meter JavaScript HTML” code.
It will look like this:
<!-- Site Meter -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s45.sitemeter.com/js/counter.js?site=s45yourusername">
</script>
<noscript>
<a href="http://s45.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s45yourusername" target="_top">
<img src="http://s45.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s45yourusername" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/></a>
</noscript>
<!-- Copyright (c)2009 Site Meter -->
Paste this into a widget. Be warned: On occasion, some browsers (like Flock) will sometimes strip out Javascript in the code, rendering it useless and making gibberish appear in the sidebar. If it does, switch to a different browser or restart your computer. This usually works for me. If it doesn’t ever work, use the straight HTML code. You will then have to regularly log into Sitemeter to check your stats.
As always, if you have questions or waznt to pass along new information, just comment.
Not only has TellPeoria blogger Judy Rosella Edwards resumed blogging at her eponymous site, she’s started a whole new blog, called “Underground@Springdale. ” It’s an interesting concept. She visits various graves at the historic cemetery on North Prospect, snaps a photo, and then tells that person’s history. It’s a great way to make history come alive.
