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.

A Little Frustrated

Ok, so I’m getting a bit frustrated here. For quite a while now I have been using this website, FeedBlitz.com, which basically allows you to subscribe to get any new posts e-mailed to you from your friends’ and family members’ blogs. At first I was happy with this free service – I set it up so that I received one e-mail with new posts from my friends’ blogs and a separate e-mail with new posts from my family’s blogs. Then I had all the new posts right in my inbox, in two neat lists, and I could look at them when it was convenient for me, without having to worry that I might have missed something if I hadn’t had time to check out everyone’s blogs for a while. So, this service is still working well, the only problem is private blogs.

Once a blog goes private, even if I am an invited reader of that blog, FeedBlitz no longer has the ability to send me an e-mail when a private blog is updated. I checked with FeedBlitz to make sure, and they said that it isn’t possible. So, I have been getting these e-mails that have a few new blog posts from friends’ and family members’ blogs, but they have a lot of blank entries that just say, “Blogger login to read,” and then I have to click on the link in the e-mail and go to each private blog and read the post there. It seems that this wouldn’t be too big of a deal, but with so many of my friends deciding to go public lately, I am getting e-mails from FeedBlitz that end up having more links to private blogs than posts. So, there’s not much reason to get those e-mails anymore – I have a list of links right on my blog, so I don’t need those e-mailed to me all the time.

I decided that there must be a better way around this. I mean, I really like the idea of keeping up to date with friends and family who have blogs, and with our stage in life right now we are doing a lot of moving around the country and so our friends and family are spread all over the place. I love to be able to catch up on their lives easily. But with so many blogs to read, if I only took the time to read through the new posts on each blog once a month, it would still take me quite a while to do so, and I would probably miss some posts here and there. That’s why I really liked the option of having all the new posts sent right to me so they were all there, waiting for a time that was convenient for me to read them.

I have several friends who have used Google Reader to keep track of blogs and other websites, so I decided that this would be a nice alternative. I could have a list of all the blog posts in one spot, and it would show me which ones I had read and which ones were new. And I have generally been pleased with Google applications, so I figured this would be a good one to use. I started to enter in all of my family members’ blogs on my Google Reader list, and then when I got pretty far down the list, I had one that wouldn’t work. It said that there was no feed for this blog. I realized that this was the first private blog that I had entered in, and that was the problem. Apparently you can’t even follow private Google blogspot blogs that you have been invited to with Google Reader. So, I’m a little frustrated that I wasted my precious time when all four of my boys were napping entering a list of blogs into Google Reader, only to find out that it’s not going to work any better than the e-mail blog subscriptions that I already have set up.

Does anyone have any suggestions for me on this. At this point I’m thinking that my only two options are to regularly click on the link for every blog and see if it has been updated since I last read it or to just decide not to be so OCD and not care if I miss a post here and there (I could do that, but I wouldn’t like it). Aargh!