Performance measures

At some point, you want to know that you are reaching the public. Hey, I’m going to want to know that *of* you. So, there are a few metrics we might consider for that.

*Traffic*

I can get a traffic report that lets me know how many people are visiting your site each month. You can do that too, by adding a small piece of code to your template. Go to Site Meter and sign up. They will give you a little piece of code that you will need to insert somewhere on your index page. (There are actually a number of places that will provide this service: e.g., bravenet has one, too.)

Once you have the code, log in to your blog and insert the code in your index page, which can be found under “templates.” Depending on your layout, you can probably just put the code before the two lines that read:

at the very end.

There are similar services that will host polls and similar toys for you. Usually, they give you a snippet of code that you can put either in a message or on the template for the page.

It may be too early for most of you, but once you have a fairly large traffic base, you can also get an audience estimate at Alexa. I’m a bit dubious about the reliability of that measure, though.

*Comments & Trackbacks*

This is pretty obvious. If folks are commenting on your posts, you know that you are having some effect. In many cases if they are blogging about your posting, you will also get a trackback message. Either one means that you are having an effect on your audience, and the trackback means that other people who might not otherwise find your blog now can.

*Searching in-links*

If you go to Google and type link:http://alex.halavais.net/ (er. but use your own url) you get a list of folks who are linking to you. Technorati can tell you which _blogs_ are linking to you.

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2 Comments

  1. Posted 11/18/2004 at 3:54 pm | Permalink

    Or – get your own domain from a host that offers stats packages (mine provides AWStats and one other one – forget the name).

  2. Posted 11/18/2004 at 3:59 pm | Permalink

    Sorry, I should clarify. This is meant mainly for students using the blogserver at school. We actually do have AWstats for the server, which I may “reveal” here at some point (once I’m satisfied it isn’t a privacy/spam issue).

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