SiteMeter

So, lots of our friends have started making their blogs private, but I’ve not wanted to do that because it makes it a lot harder for friends to find your blog (I have enjoyed reconnecting with several old friends by finding their blogs, and I also like how easy it is to get my friends’ new blog posts e-mailed to me so I can keep up to date on what’s going on with everyone, but if they have private blogs they don’t come across on the e-mails). Anyways, I was thinking about a friend of mine, who decided to make her blog private after she tracked who was coming to her blog and found that more than one person in locations where she didn’t know anyone had Googled the word “diaper” and then spent a significant amount of time on her blog. Although making our blog private would be very inconvenient, I have thought about that friend, and wondered if I should be more careful about what I post on our blog. One blog feature that I really like is our SiteMeter ticker at the very bottom of the page (where it says “17,717 visitors since May 1, 2007”). If you’re not familiar with SiteMeter, it is a free counter that not only tells how many visitors have visited the blog, but you can click on that number at the bottom of the page and get information on who is visiting your blog. It doesn’t give a person’s name, but it does list just about any other information you could want to know about your blog readers, such as where in the world they are located, how long they spent on your blog, what website they visited before they came to your blog, etc. I like the map feature – you can tell it to show your most recent visitors on a world map, and then you have the option to click on each of the little dots on the map to get details about each blog visitor. I hadn’t looked at this information for a while, but since my friends’ experience I decided to see who was looking at our blog.

I was rather relieved with what I found. Although most of my recent blog visitors were from the U.S., there were four from around England, one from South Africa, and another from Australia. As far as I know, I don’t have any friends living in those locations, so I took a look at their details first. The one in Africa visited our blog for less than 1 second (which I am assuming means that they Googled a topic and clicked on our blog, and then left right away when they found out that it wasn’t what they were looking for). The one in Australia had also spent less than 1 second on our blog, and it said that they had Googled the words “Michael Bradshaw piano” (I wonder if there is a Michael Bradshaw who is a famous Australian pianist???). And the ones in Europe had come to our blog after visiting FamilySearch.org (where I have posted my genealogy files and a link to our blog in order to make contacts for genealogy research, so I think it is great that several people have been able to use the blog to contact me about genealogy lately). I also found several people in the U.S. who had visited our blog after looking at my genealogy info. I didn’t take the time to click on every U.S. visitor, but the ones that I did look at had found our blog when they Googled things like “Ideas for New Years Family Goals,” “Dermatology Interviews,” “Different ways you can spell the name Kolby,” “Double Swaddle for Baby,” and “Gospel ABC Book,” (you would be surprised at how many people have seen my post from last year about the cute little Gospel ABC book that I got from Heather Dawson and have written to ask me if they could have copies of it). And there are also several that came to our blog by clicking on links on our friends’ blogs too. But nothing alarming that I could see. I’ll just have to continue to check on that every once in a while and make sure there are no weirdos out there looking at my kids in an inappropriate way or anything.