Pardon my spinning propeller...

Ok, here's something that might be of interest to you bloggers out there.

I was recently looking through the statistics on my blog and noticed a new name pop up on the referral list. It was from Carlin Brooks who is an elder at the Maple Hill Church where we used to attend. I had no idea that he was blogging...or reading mine. He had some nice things to say (thank you Carlin!).

Anyway, I got to thinking, I only knew he did that because someone clicked on the link. How could I know if someone links to my blog (or web site or anything) even if no one clicks on the link? Some time ago, I was researching a programming problem that I was having. Someone had mentioned a similar problem in his blog, and the developer of the product commented on it and helped him fix the problem. He mentioned that he found the post using Google Alerts, so I thought I'd check it out.

Google alerts lets you create search terms that will be automatically executed for you on a scheduled basis. The results will then be emailed to you. Anything that has already been sent to you will be filtered out so that all you receive will be new information.

Here is an easy way to set up an alert for your blog. Go to Blog Search @ Google, type link:yourblogaddress.com (I typed link:constanttransformation.blogspot.com. When the results are displayed, there will be a link that says:

Create an email alert for link:constanttransformation.blogspot.com

Click on that, enter your email address and you are done.

I received my first notification this morning and look what it was:

Google Blogs Alert for: link:constanttransformation.blogspot.com
My evil friend Donnie...
By John Grant(John Grant)
My evil friend Donnie "tagged" me. Can't he see that I struggle just to post, much less to play blog games? His comment on the game?... "Man....that's a lot of work, I hope these don't come around too often...." ...
Finding Our Place -- reflections... - http://johngrant.blogspot.com/

See, I never would have known about this had I not set up the alert since nobody reads John's blog anyway (just teasing John, I know Amy reads it) ;-)

Blogger milestone

Being a fairly new blogger, I'm still fascinated by the idea that anyone would be interested in anything I had to say. I learned about the technology behind blogging several years ago. I saw some really interesting business uses for it, but personally why would anybody just post random thoughts for the whole internet to read? Over the years, I'd thought about starting one. I would start, then never find the time to write or didn't know what to write about so I would quit. Finally, I just started writing to it fairly regularly. It's been almost two months now, and I've kept it going.

I still don't know why posting random thoughts is compelling, or why anyone would read it, but I have found myself going through the day thinking about what I'm going to write. I'm hoping that I can get a better camera phone soon so that I can get some pictures on here without having to lug my digital camera around.

Anyway, the milestone that I passed yesterday was 1,000 pageviews and ironically, 500 visits. For the non-geeks in the audience, a visit is when a unique person visits a web site or blog. There is usually a time associated with visits so that if you visit the same site within a half hour (time varies) it is considered a single visit. If you visit the same site outside of that time limit, it is considered a separate visit. Within a visit, a reader may go to several different pages, each page visited would count as a pageview. A thousand pageviews isn't much for a big web site, but for some yahoo Tennessean blowing off steam every once in a while, I'm sort of proud of it.

This blog has been visited at least once by people from 22 different states as well as 8 different foreign countries. Most of the visitors have come here from my dear friend Amy Grant's blog (not her, the other one). The most visited post was the one that I did on Thorn Removal. Followed closely by the one on Getting up early.

Web site statistics is a fairly interesting subject. I'm going to create a post on my technical blog about Google Analytics which is where all of these stats are coming from. If you bloggers out there aren't familiar with it, you might find it very interesting to see who is reading what.

Not another blog!!!!!

Yes, I've started another blog. Cedar City Group Blog is a blog for technical people (commonly referred to as 'geeks') and business owners (people who hire 'geeks'). I plan to keep the constant transformation blog on more of a personal level.

I've just finished setting it up and making my first post there. Please subscribe if you have any interest at all. I do plan to post some information that is relevant to blogging.

Comments

A conversation between Kathy and I this morning.....

Donnie: (with a Shirley Temple-esque pouty face) Everybody leaves comments on Amy's blog, why doesn't anybody leave comments on mine?
Kathy: You have to have a Google account to comment on yours.
Donnie: doh!

Some quick research allowed me to find how to open comments to everyone. Comments are welcome and appreciated.