More FUEL to my web statistics addiction - FeedJit
As if my addiction to web stats wasn’t bad enough. Now I have a new tool that adds fuel to that problem - but it might also cure it a bit too..maybe. :-S
As reported previously, I decided on using two statistics tracking tools - Google Analytics and Statcounter. Each has their merits and I use them for different things. Google is incredibly comprehensive, and great for analysing and interpreting traffic patterns over the longer term, but it’s disappointingly slow over the short (read immediate) term. Statcounter fills that gap with up to the minute updates - but hitting refresh every 20 seconds on the statcounter home page tends to take over your life a little bit and ties you to the keyboard.
The other day while visiting Home Maker Hero, I stumbled across FeedJit which is ostensibly a widget for your blog or other website, that shows the last 8 or so visitors to your site, where they came from (geographically speaking) and also from whence they came (link speaking!). This allows all visitors to the site to get an indication of how other people are finding that site and could provide links to sites of similar interest - when there are sufficient backlinks to the site in question, that is.
I believe in transparency, and so I’m not ashamed to reveal the number of visitors to the site and of course am happy to promote those locations that people arrived from - it’s only fair that those sites kind enough to link here should get some exposure/credit. Feedjit goes a long way to helping with this.
While examining my Feedjit widget this morning, I discovered an option that will step my addiction up a notch - “Watch in real time”. This option, which sits at the bottom of the widget, takes you to a new page that displays visitors as they arrived and plays a sound (a muted ding) when new ones arrive in real time! No more hitting refresh, refresh, refresh on Statcounter. I love this feature. Now I can leave Feedjit Live open in a spare tab and be notified audibly when I have new traffic. This should help my productivity enormously and remove some distraction…note, I said “should”!
As with all good stat tracking apps, you can block your own IP so as to not overinflate your stats - which is a good thing. Especially for me.
Feedjit is a fun and very useful little gadget. Realtime tracking makes it invaluable. Check it out and install it on your site. Feedjit has 4 flavours of widget which show very different things:
- Live Traffic Feed - visitors and from where they came
- Live Traffic Map - plots visitors as ‘pins’ on a clickable World map (Google Maps mashup)
- Live Recommended Reading - Other pages on the site people have also enjoyed recently
- Live Page Popularity - page popularity ranked and with allocated percentages
Note: the link to realtime stats only seems to appear on the Live Traffic Feed widget, but regardless of the widget you choose, you can get at the live feed by appending your URL to the end of http://live.feedjit.com/live/
Given my propensity for checking web stats (and I am sure I’m not alone when it comes to this kind of addiction), I am sure Feedjit is a play on the word fidget - which just about sums me up! ;-)
Enjoy!
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