Someday I'll Figure Out What This is About

Update (because I confused myself): I realized today that this post was marked as “private” and that no one could see it… I’m not clear on whether that means it was never published (in which case, my comments in my FeedBurner post will have been lacking some context) or if I just screwed things up after the fact. Anyway, if you’ve already read this post, there’s nothing new to see.

Contrary to what my marks in University might lead you to believe, I really like statistics. Specifically, I’m fascinated by web server statistics for my websites and seeing what sort of things people look at, or how they actually find the site in the first place.

The most recent Google searches that found uptoeleven.ca were “rogue galaxy getting the earth key” and “reggie watts” (I don’t imagine either visitor found what they were looking for). Most of the traffic to morgoth.org is Kraft Dinner-related, although occasionally things like “categorical imperative” show up since Google’s indexed my second-year philosophy paper. Currently, “crotch” is the number three search term that led to morgoth.org. This confuses (and amuses) me to no end. I’m guessing those people probably didn’t find what they were looking for either.

The web server that I’m hosted on has Analog installed for pulling stats out of the Apache logs. It does a decent job, although it’s not exactly pretty. I also set up Google Analytics for uptoeleven.ca. It’s got a lot of tools geared to analysing and optimising your Google Ads, but, ignoring that stuff, still has some pretty graphs and geographic overlays (“Hi!” to the person visiting me from Bat-Yam). The one drawback is that it requires you to stick some JavaScript into your pages so that statistics are sent to Google on each page hit. Since about 50% of the overall “hits” I get are through the rss feeds (which aren’t amenable to JavaScriptage), Analytics is missing half the picture.

Looking around, it seems like FeedBurner would be a good way to get statistics on rss readership, and it looks like I should be able to hook things up so that it’s invisible to people subscribing (and already subscribed) to the feeds. The site seems frighteningly full of marketspeak, though. I’m not really interested in “publicizing,” “optimizing,” or “monetizing” my blog… I just want to satisfy the demon inside me, calling out for more pretty graphs. On the plus side, they seem to appreciate the marketing value of letting people go back, so if I try to experiment I shouldn’t end up stuck.

Does anyone have any experience (good or bad) with FeedBurner, either on your own site, or as a subscriber to a “burned” feed?