Page Statistics are Cocaine for Bloggers

Watching your blog's visitor stats is EXTREMELY addicting.

And it's most addictive in small doses. When I first started blogging I would compulsively check my stats more frequently than I checked Facebook, Twitter and Gmail combined. Not a single pageview escaped my hungry, all-seeing gaze!

When I realized that 80% of these views were actually my own, it was a letdown. But I soon discovered how to block my own pageviews with a cookie, and the addiction continued:

"Oooh! Two people clicked on my facebook link!"

"Wow, a visit from India!"

"Another one from BC! Grandma got my email!"

Even worse is the crash after the high (we've all been there):

"WAHHHHH no one at all has visited my blog in 5 hours! Nobody loves me! I suck at writing!" 

[Looks at pictures of fish for inspiration; ODs on pirogies and skittles]

I'm trying to learn moderation in my addiction. There's been some improvement as more people read my blog and their visits are more equally spread out. I imagine that very VERY popular blog owners must look at their stats and react like this:

"Huh. I got a billion thousand hits this past month. That is a *punches calculator* 5.29% increase over last month. Perhaps my post about disappearing bearsharktopus habitat was moderately interesting after all."

One thing still leaves me very curious.

There are many unknown visitors who have viewed my site at least 10 times. Most of them come here from Facebook. This means I know them.

They come, they read, but they never comment. And it leaves me confused and mentally yelling: "WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE???"

Introducing:
LURKERS of DEFENESTRATED FEET*

A tutorial for these wanted posters can be found here, if you're interested.

And now I worry that I've scared them all away...

If you are a seasoned blogger, you're probably familiar with the wonders of statcounter.com and marvel that anyone might be blogging along blindly without it. You couldn't live without the details of IP addresses and commenting habits of your visitors so as to cyberstalk them more efficiently.

If you are an unaware or new blogger you may ask: "You mean I can see exactly who clicks my pages, and when, and in what order, and their screen resolution and operating system and city and country and internet browser? WHAAAT?" Yes, you can. Get thee to the statcounter! (They should totally pay me for this glowing endorsement, yo.)

If you are not a blogger and do not own a website, you're probably OH MY NOODLES freaking out right now. As you read these words you may be naively starting up a virus and malware scan. It's not enough. Paralysed by the thought of identity theft, you will resolve to incinerate your computer, flashdrives, and iPhone. You will cancel all your credit cards and leave the country. The rest of your internet life will be spent trainhopping through Europe, visiting a new internet cafe each day and hiding behind multiple IP proxy servers.

Or at the very least, you will disable all cookies. (But that will only inflate my statistics to ridiculous highs. And then my head will explode, and nobody wants to see the mess that would make.)

The best solution by far is to somehow make this blog famous overnight! Your visits will be lost in a sea of traffic and my logs will only go back 30 minutes because a 500-entry log is free and I'm too poor to justify paying money for the privilege of being creepy.

I win. You win. Everybody wins! (But mostly me.)

*If you ARE one of the people who come here looking for pictures of butts, shame on you! But the info here is (mostly) fake.

Of HTML and Blogger: Here Be Dragons.

The legendary Bloggogg and his devil-spawn

My experience with HTML is extremely limited. I like to figure things out, but this is my blog and it's mine and it's wonderful (to me) and I'M TERRIFIED OF MESSING IT UP REALLY BAD. I swear I've backed up my blog template a platypillion times.

Also, getting something to almost work drives me up a spider-covered volcano of incapacitating OCD-like frustration. I will work on it for days instead of writing new posts... (hem hem) and then I get behind and don't post anything for a week. Sorry. D=

But such was the process of trying to add sharing and Facebook "like" buttons to my blog.

Before I started this blog, my only knowledge of HTML was from grade 7 computers class when we created our own webpages and published them on the school's intranet. Mine looked like this... only worse, because instead of a cartoon the picture was a grainy scan of my student ID card.

Our teacher was wrong. Large paragraphs of centered text ooze of visual barf and eye-seizures. They're slightly worse than using two spaces after periods, but not quite as bad as publishing in a monospaced font like Courier New.

But I digress.

I discovered AddThis last week and wanted to add its fancy buttons to all my posts... so people could like them and share them and stalk them. *cough* But AddThis didn't want to co-operate and Blogger made things difficult.

Working with HTML was as bad as trying to edit an essay written in another language... but without the help of using Google translate.

I finally got everything to work. I may or may not have stayed up until 4 am.

There are two things I'm getting at here...

Firstly:

If you have a Blogger blog, want to do something like what I did (or anything seen on this blog actually) and happen to think I could be helpful for whatever crazy reason...

Go ahead and ask! I like helping! Also, emails make me happy.

I did this so you don't have to. I'm a hero!

Secondly:

See those ohh-so-shiny Facebook/Twitter/SiteThingy buttons? The colourful ones that sit tantalizingly at the top and bottom of every post? The ones that I spent HOURS and HOURS fiddling with to make sure they worked perfectly? Yeah.

A lot of keyboard sweat and eyestrain tears went into those and it would suck bagels if they all just sat there.