A comparative study of blog widgets

Grading avoidance and social insecurity have led me to waste time even more efficiently than professional and reproductive insecurity did last Thursday. Let me explain.

Sitemeter has been a big part of my life since February. I check it like 20 times a day. On Saturday my hit counts took a nose dive. Lowest total I've seen, lower even than anything from before I hit the national press. What happened? Did my blog smell bad? Was Sitemeter broken? I still don't know, of course, but I've learned more about free stats services.

I've also been trying out several widgets in the Utilities section (bottom right corner of the page). My notes on those are below the site statistics flames. I'll be getting rid of most of the widgets in a few days (was the excess is part of my Sitemeter problem? even if not, is it all in poor taste?), but they'll be there you to click on in the meantime.

Disclaimer: the following is written by one naive blogger for other naifs and naives. If I'm wrong or uninformed, please inform me!

Installing widgets on Typepad: You need to track down the relevant javascript. (For most widgets, sign up at the site and wait for an e-mail. For a couple, you can get the script directly from widget's site.) Then, in a Links Typelist, copy the javascript into the "notes" section of an entry. Leave the other fields empty.

Free statistics services

Typepad's built-in stats sadly contain very little information.

Pros: Up and running from the first entry with no extra work. Lists exactly which page was loaded for every hit (no one else does that). Lists referring pages. Completely private.

Cons: Nothing on where the hits are coming from. No summaries beyond total number of hits (but they miss quite a few) and utterly wrong "hits today" and "hits this week" figures. Misses lots of hits. To get a real daily total, you have to go backwards in time, twenty hits at a time, until you get to midnight.

Sitemeter My favorite, until its little problem this weekend.

Pros: Pretty good algorithm for grouping pageviews into visitors. Associates each visit directly with its referrer and shows most of the IP address. Gives entry and exit pages for each visit, along with time elapsed between entry and exit. Lots of pretty graphs. Clearly can handle arbitrarily large amounts of traffic—Wonkette uses it. Can send e-mail reports daily or weekly. Until the recent crisis, it was picking up about 20% more hits than the built-in Typepad statistics did. Good privacy protection: stats can be password protected, and hits from IP numbers close to yours can be hidden.

Cons: Only keeps detailed information on the last 100 visitors. Some statistics are based only on the last 100 visits (e.g., page views per visit, time zone distribution) or last week (e.g., visits per day). Doesn't tell you which pages were viewed between entry and exit for a single visit. Relatively little information provided per report, so many pages must be loaded to get a sense of what's been happening. No summary data on search terms in the free version. E-mail reports tend to stop arriving for no apparent reason. Time stamp seems to be off by 4 minutes. Had some sort of crisis Saturday through Monday during which it missed two thirds of incoming hits.

Nedstat Basic: I've only been running it for about 72 hours.

Pros: Clean interface—all reports available are grouped onto 5 pages: "where from?" "how?", etc. Keeps longer-term lists of top referring sites and top search terms. Also keeps longer-term lists of repeat visitors, grouped by ISP (top 10?). Nice graphics. Catches more hits than Typepad.

Cons: Only displays the ISPs of the last 10 hits. Does not associate visitors with their referring sites. No privacy options available in free version— your stats are public, and your own hits must appear in them. Catches fewer hits than Sitemeter.

eXTReMe Tracker I've been running this one for about 48 hours.

Pros Very similar to Nedstat Basic in organization and information provided. Again, data is grouped into several reports, including summaries of referrers and search terms. Industrial strength; see Andrew Sullivan's. Major differences: the full network name of the last 20 visitors is shown (Nedstat Basic just gives you the ISP for the last 10). Up to 5 IP addresses, or ranges of IP addresses, can be blocked. Some effort is made to determine "unique visitors," as opposed to reloads.

Cons All aspects of the interface are horribly ugly. No information available on which specific pages were visited (not surprising, since the free tracker is only supposed to be installed on one page—fortunately, it seems to work fine as part of the Typepad stationery). Time stamping is even further off than Sitemeter's.

The sad truth: they all lie. Here are the numbers provided over a single twenty-four hour period when all four services seemed to be fully functional:

• Typepad: 234 pageviews. (And yes, they're really counting pageviews, not visitors.)

• Sitemeter: 386 pageviews, 239 visits.

• Nedstat Basic: 310 pageviews.

• eXTReMe Tracker: 304 pageviews, 243 unique visitors.

(Sally Field moment: omigod thank you everyone!)

In my obsessive watching over the last couple of days, I've seen cases of hits that were missed by each one of the trackers, although picked up by the other three. Installer beware.

Recommendations: If you're a secure person, avoid all of them. Otherwise, start with Sitemeter; it tells you much more than the others about who's reading, what specifically they're reading, and how they found you. Once traffic gets above 100 hits between checks, you'll probably want one of Nedstat or eXTReMe, both of which keep information on referrers, etc. around longer and have better summary reports. Nedstat is cozier; eXTReMe is marginally more informative but seems to be about equally effective.

Anonymous bloggers beware: If you click on the links in the referrer lists of your stat service, and the site you're going to uses Sitemeter, the author finds out who you are, or at least what ISP you're using. (More specifically, the last two "words" in the node name, like granolan.edu or rr.com or ac.uk, are revealed; clearly, the specificity depends on the site. Also, all but the last byte of the IP address appears in Sitemeter.) If the site has an eXTReMe tracker, your entire machine name (which may be something like emaple423.granolan.edu, depending on your setup) may be visible. Also, if you comment on a Typepad blog (or I assume any other species), your full IP number is left behind.

Directory services

Technorati: Sign up right now.

More precisely, claim your blog; they probably already know it's out there. (Sometimes links show up there before they do in the stats.) Yes, they're in beta and it shows. Forgive them. Their ranking by number of incoming links (I think it's only visible on the user profile after signing up) is too cool: Barely Tenured is in the top how many of 2.3 million blogs tracked? The number of blogs and links tracked is growing so fast (something like 16,000 per day) that the ranking slips down bit by bit until there's a new link. Wow. It's so cool to watch.

Blogwise: Pretty good.

Kind of homegrown but still functional. The keyword directory is nice and I've actually been getting hits off of it (for academia and infertility). Lists about 20,000 blogs. Go join!

The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem: Fun, but not big enough to be really amusing.

Vaguely paleolithic warblog feel, overall. Lists about 11,000 blogs.

Blogstreet: Horrible.

Usually fails to load before Safari times it out. Still hasn't figured out that anyone else links to Barely Tenured. And, while it picks up book links in entries, it skips Books Typelists. Lists about 144,000 blogs.

trueFresco referrers list: Kind of fun, but doesn't work well enough.

It doesn't actually list "Referring Web Pages, last 24 hours." It lists web pages that have referred in the last 24 hours, but with the number of referrals since the last time they cleared the buffer, which they seem to do at entirely random intervals. Also, Barely Tenured's linking sites are about evenly split between http://maplestreet.blogs.com and http://maplestreet.blogs.com/trying. The list of referrers displayed depends on the URL used. That's inconvenient.

Comments

[Katherine]

I've corresponded a bit with the guy who maintains SiteMeter; for him, it's a part-time hobby, and I think, given that he can't devote full attention to it, that it's actually a really good service.

I've had NedStat before... but SM is just more fun.

The TTLB Ecosystem is unpredictable; its maintainer is away which is probably why the SQL database broke again.
But it's kind of cool to be ranked according to your status; I'm still a rodent...

Thing is, though: I run my own server with its own tracking software. According to it, I get around 800 hits a day. This makes sense, because a lot of my readers access my blog through newsfeeds. SiteMeter, otoh, lists only 70-80 hits a day. WTF? How can one program say 800 and the other only have 80? I think, therefore, that SiteMeter filters some things out, because my server software gets EVERYONE who comes to visit. I get referrals, origins--EVERYTHING.

(And the only one who's ever been truly anonymous is isabella v., from http://shes.aflightrisk.org)

Keep in mind, however, not all of us want to be listed on search engines, directories, and so forth... and we don't show up if you go looking for us. ;-)

[Rivka]

Sitemeter was broken last weekend, and it damn near killed me. I have got to find a better source of self-esteem. Hits are too precarious.

(I love your blog, by the way. It's going on my blogroll in the next update.)

[Adrienne]

I can't figure out how to get extreme tracker on my typepad account.....Great info here!

[John]

Check out Google analytics. I've been using them for a month or so and they provide great statistics, all for free. http://www.google.com/analytics

[Nintendo Ds cases]

I subscribed to your blog when is the next post

[buy acai berry]

I wasn't going to comment as this post was written a while ago, but I found myself asking a lot of questions when I read it. I think it is important to find the blogs that you read regularly and stay involved in the discussion in a regular, relevant and timely manner. So I'll be back and see whether you'll be answering :o).