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Why Is Google Analytics A Boon And A Curse? – The Cry Of A Small Pond Blogger

Ha ha. That’ll learn me. Not five minutes after posting this, Kieron of the most excellent Rock Paper Shotgun just uber-pimped Space Office Fight.

I am no longer sad. Someone should wipe the smile off my face.

Here’s my Google Analytics graph for the last month (ish):

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Impressive huh?

Ahem.

I’ve been doing this (blogging) for a while now. Dev Dawn started back in August 2005. So this August will be four years.

Sure, that’s not very long compared to some, but it’s long enough. I’m still here. Still going.

Google Analytics is both a Boon and a Curse.

Boon – Seriously, you need to know this stuff about your blog. And Google Analytics is free. It tells you most everything a little blogger could want to know.

Curse – Have you seen the above graph? One spike. And we’re not talking about thousands here either. The spike is a StumbleUpon hit parade that took me to just under a thousand visits that day. Every other day ranges around the five to ten visits mark. Except there’s another bump when I released Space Office Fight, up to around seventy visits.

I’ve read Problogger and other wisdom on how to be a success at blogging.

I think I am a success because I write about what I’m doing, and I love doing it.

But I’m not a success in the terms that matter on a different level. Numbers. Visitors. Other people listening to you.

So what am I saying? Not a great deal. I’m a bit sad I guess. I’ve written some decent content over the past few months, released software, I’ve created a game and pimped it to the best of my ability (which needs to get much better, obviously).

Sometimes you want to see some concrete evidence of “the numbers” success. This is just one of those moments.

It is well.

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Base, Analytics and Joomla

Okay, so by now everyone has heard that … Google Base is live. It’s gonna rock the world … most probably.

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It’s rather sparse at the moment, well … comparitively against a normal Google search, ha, but that’ll change quickly. Google is a trusted name/brand. I’d say they’ll have plans in motion to implement all kinds of goodies over the next few months within the Base functionality.

Google Analytics, after a bit of a shaky start, seems to have righted itself. I’m getting some stats, although as Tad (spot) reported, it ain’t all there yet. They are seriously making their way into many different segments of the ‘Net. And it doesn’t matter if initially their product doesn’t do all that the others do … they’re Google, and the masses will use them. Me being one of the ‘Masses’.

Anyway, have been spending a little of my time with Joomla lately. My brain is having trouble wrapping itself around the actual management of content. Don’t laugh … it’s true. But just doing the simple things is making things clearer. It (and Mambo, it’s forefather) seems to be a very powerful content management system. I like the large support base, lots of helpful hints lying around the net.

Lastly, I’ve just purchased Snag It, screen capture (amongst other things) software. It’s simple, and powerful. Just the kind of functionality I like. Kudos to you Snag It peeps. It’s gonna be very handy for getting images into blog entries, and other things.

Images. Blog. Yeah.