Ed may never be a multi-gazillionaire like Gates. And it’s a pretty safe bet he’ll never be a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars” like Wozniak.
Ed Schwebel
But when it comes to computer wizardry, he’s right up there with the big guys. At least to a rank amateur like myself who wouldn’t know the difference between levels of computer expertise if somebody hit me over the head with something you stick in a USB port (fortunately such things tend to be small and non-lethal).
In fact, I’m pretty pleased with myself for knowing what a USB port is and where to find mine. Whatever did us computer amateurs do back when we had to find a specific hole for every plug to fit into?
Anyway, Ed teaches online computer classes for the University of Phoenix and he’s my neighbor. When I told him I wanted to start a blog, he told me he could help – and he did.
Then, when I got the blog up and running, he helped me hook it up to Google Analytics, a website that tracks traffic on one’s blog in ways I would never have dreamed possible.
At first, I must admit, I was apprehensive. What if it turned out that only three people each day were visiting the Gazette blog – me, The Consort and Ed?
But Ed insisted we have to know these things. And besides, there was the inspiring movie “Julie and Julia,” in which Julie’s blog went from being absolutely alone out there in cyberspace to an international sensation.
Erudite Gazette Columnist Noble Collins and I have talked more than once about how cool it would be if we could grow our blog to attract a larger than local audience. As semi-serious writers, we would like to think that our words might someday be deemed worthy of reaching beyond the confines of Northern Gila County.
To make a long story short, Ed hooked the blog up to Google Analytics by impressively taking a long and convoluted computer code from one place and sticking it someplace else. If my life depended on it, I could not even remember where he stuck it, much less how to duplicate that magical feat.
We turned it on Dec. 7, and I am ecstatic to report that the Rim Country Gazette blog is indeed attracting a larger audience than The Consort and two Rimaroos without lives of their own. In fact, I am absolutely overjoyed at what Google Analytics revealed.
In the slightly more than two weeks since Google Analytics has been tracking the blog, it has received 1,896 visits. That’s an average of 111 per day and 3,330 per month.
While I was relieved to know that Noble and I (and Leilah Breitler and Mary Williams and Matt and Mitzi Brabb and all the other contributors) weren’t spewing into black holes of nothingness, Ed says our goal is 1,000 hits a day and we should get there sometime early next year.
I hope he’s right, but I’ll be happy to just keep our readership steadily growing as the word spreads. Sounds like a cult or something, doesn’t it?
In the meantime, here’s some other cool stuff Google Analytics reveals about you, our loyal readers.
You live in 24 countries. Besides the USA, we have readers in Mexico, Canada, India, Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, France, Colombia, South Korea, Romania, United Arab Emirates, Norway, Hong Kong, Czech Republic, Spain, Argentina, Lithuania, Italy and Pakistan.
Sixty percent of you log on to our blog direct, 21 percent of you come via a referring site (including the students at Troy State University-Montgomery who “love your blog postings”), and 18 percent of you find us through a search engine like Google.
Once here, you visit an average of 2.33 pages and spend an average of 2 minutes 29 seconds. Somebody in India spent 28 minutes on our blog, while somebody in Spain lasted 20 minutes.
Forty-seven percent of you are visiting the site for the first time, which means 53 percent of you are addicted to us and have to keep coming back for more.
And that’s OK. Remember, Toto, there’s no place like our blog … there’s no place like our blog … there’s no place like our blog…
Photo by Jim Keyworth
They're a little long in the tooth, but The Consort and Buddy make a pretty good Dorothy and Toto.
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