Just a simple way to track my Blog's visitors

Ever since I started my blog at the volkskrantblog.nl, the stats have been tracked by Motigo, the VKB-preferred tracker company.
However, since day one this tracker didn't really do what I wanted it to, but I didn't have the time or energy to dive into the complicated system with separate java-scripts-based page ID's.

What I wanted was basically a simple tracker, showing me which blog entries have been read by which visitor. I don't really need a spiffy graph with all my visitors represented as flags on a gently spinning globe. I would much rather be able to identify which pages are being read (and which ones aren't) without having to resort copying and pasting a separate piece of code into each of the 150+ blog-entries I had written so far. And I'd like to know which days of the week and which times of the day are the most busy.

I most definitely do not want to make Tracker-Management an important time-consuming part of my responsibilities in maintaining a blog. Just paste one piece of code somewhere and w00t, done. So essentially the tracker I had so far has never came even close to working the way I wanted it to.


Premium Subscription...

To add insult to injury, I have recently been the recipient of an extensive series of emails, written with a cascading sense of urgency, where Motigo went from 'inviting' to 'bullying' me into becoming a Premium Subscriber. Wink Wink. Marketing speak for “Show Me The Money!”
After which my Tracker was disabled...

So instead of having to pay for a service that is non-satisfactory in the first place, I figured it might be a nice experiment to go ahead and build my own visitor tracker. Nothing fancy, but just something that reports what I want it to report. And as little installation hassles as possible.

So what I have so far is a PHP-based visitor tracker script, which I essentially wrote for myself. However, since some bloggers at the VolkskrantBlog asked if they could use it as well, i decided to adopt it to more general use. It was a fun and interesting project, and this would be a nice extension to it. And besides a good exercise for the Prefectionist that I am. An exercise in trying to put a work in progress out there, and let other people play with something that is nice, but not prefect. Yet.


Digital fish and chips

Little did I know where that exercise would bring me. The three people that played Beta-tester where incredibly thrilled with TelMiep, which is what the new Visitor Tracker was christened.
- Within a week 15 fellow bloggers had installed TelMiep on their blogs.
- Today, barely a month afyer the first public Beta, TelMiep is rapidly serving one third of the active users and has indexed over 10.000 blog entries.
- This week I was informed that the TelMiep technology would be integrated within the upcoming update to VolksKrantBlog 2.0, and would become the standard tracking technology to be used by the VKB.

What is it that people are so thrilled about?
TellMeep opens up an entirely new dimension to your blog, it seems.
So far, I knew how many people visited a page in the blog somewhere, and I assumed that 90% of those would be for the most recent entry. The older entries where out of sight and slowly being marched down the blog page. Chances are they were somewhere being used to wrap up digital fish and chips with...


It's alive!

Well I was wrong, it turns out. A blog is different from a newspaper in that older entries keep on attracting new readers that are being informed, stimulated or annoyed, depending on the current news. So whenever a certain political issue is being revived again, I immediately see my entries about those subjects coming to life.

Even when no one reacts to my latest posting, it seems I have been able to write a number that keep on attracting interested visitors. I never knew, or realized this, until I saw my TellMeep stats.
It has helped me get a more even perspective on my blog, which also helps me to deal with the 'psychological shock-effect' of a posting that has dropped absolutely dead after two days of hard writing...

A third of the active bloggers at the VKB can't be entirely wrong, I figured, so the last weeks I have been working on rewriting the TelMiep-code for the blogger-engine that drives blogger.com and blogspot.com. I have been my own beta-tester, and I have to say I am very happy with how it turned out.

TellMeep tracks all visits to this blog, and shows me what pages people click on and, if they like what they read, where they click next...


Fun, useful en addictive

Based on the feedback received from a couple of self-professed total digibetes, the installation instructions are clear enough, enabling them to install TellMeep at the first try. W00t!

So, currently those instructions are being translated to the 'blogger-version' and will shortly appear in this blog.
TellMeep.blogspot.com will be the central depository for all things related to TellMeep, with installation instructions, a FAQ, and lots of room for feature requests and feedback.

And yes, I know it is tooting my own horn, but I have to repeat this comment made by fellow-blogger Ernst: “TelMiep is fun, useful en addictive.”

Back to translating!