Saturday, February 10, 2007

Blogger Update and Blogging statistics

One item of feedback I received from my father Grumpy Old Bookman was that after I moved to the new version of blogger, he saw 25 posts he'd previously read, as "new" in his RSS reader, bloglines.com . So apologies to the people using bloglines.com, I did not see this problem with the RSS reader NewsNetWire that I use.

As mentioned before, I also had to fix the template so that clicking I'm A Seoul Man takes you to the home page as before. Since the ItemPage attribute no longer worked, I removed the four references to it and it now seems to work.

This ensures anyone reaching one of my posts from a post-item link can easily go to the home page without having to edit the URL in the address bar.

So, how do people reach the blog? The wild and wonderful stats of Google Analytics lists these search strings, amongst others:

seoul man
gerry bevers
ask enquired clothing
sk korea send sms to england
places to go in seoul
bosintang
prisoner of wonderland: an esl misadventure
christmas in korea
national arboretum seoul
yongpyong
polham clothing
yang yong-eun
korean pop bands
recycling in korea
korean blogs
noryangjin fish market
seoul blog
aussie in seoul

All of these I can understand, but some of the other 320 people who came here last month from Google were looking for something I cannot provide :

cameron diaz privat cell phone
mind charity shops dulwich village
photo of man walking in london fog
urban myths in wimborne
i'm a snow man
the man who cooked his girlfriend for dinner

I find it all quite fascinating, particulary the last one!

It also provides a list of the number of visitors that have been referred from other sites. A very large number come from Gdog's blog The Daily Kimchi. He puts a huge amount of effort into writing and promoting his blog. I hope one day he makes as much money as Darren Rowse who claims a six figure income from blogging. (and he's not talking South Korean won here either).

Another big source of referrals is The Korean Bloglist. I have not completely given up my idea of trying to visit all the blogs on the list, but I have certainly slowed down.

All these great blogs have provided me with visitors, so go check them out:
Between pee and kimchee
A Geek in Korea
LostNomad
SeoulLife
Kimchi For Breakfast
Soju and I
The Road Not Taken
DPRK studies
Chosun Bimbo
Expatriate Games
Looking @ Reflection
Seoul Hero
The Marmot's Hole
Joe Seoul Man
Guano Island
Yeolchae
eye4insanity
Geofftech
Student in Korea
IdiotsCollective

The other sites from which I've had a few referrals include flickr.com, Thorn Tree, expat-blog.com and eflblogs.com

So if you have a blog and not signed up for Google Analytics go for it. It's free and provides hours of entertainment!

3 comments:

Gary said...

Hey Jon, the blog looks good after the change over to the "new" blogger. I did the change over as well, but I have yet to "update" my template to the new version.

Google Analytics is pretty addicting. It's always fun to check stats!

Karen Blakeman said...

My Omea reader also reported past postings as unread, but that seems to happen with Blogger even if it is a minor change in the system. I've not noticed it so much on the new system, apart from blogs that have transferred, but it was a regular "feature" of the old Blogger.

Keep up the good work!

Jon Allen said...

Thanks Karen and Gdog.