Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Following Janelle's lead, I upgraded my blog to the Blogger Beta. I'm not exactly sure why I did it. There was no feature that I wanted to use, but I was starting to feel like a Luddite. I mean if Janelle, a lowly furniture designer, was going take the technological leap, then I, an illustrious computer programmer, would be leaping off the Empire State Building right behind her, hoping to pass her on the way down.

The move to Beta seemed to go smoothly last night, but then I noticed something odd today. My sitemeter, which tells me how many people visited my blog (and thus how many people love me) was reporting very low numbers.

For example, yesterday, before I did the move to Beta, I had about 60 visitors. That's a score of 60 Loveworthinesses. Today my Loveworthinesses score will probaby be in the 30s (and a bunch of those are me loving myself). This will be the lowest Loveworthinesses score I've had on a weekday in a long time.

Is it coincidence that I stopped being loved exactly when I moved to the Beta Blogger? Or am I just inherently less lovable now?

What if my blog smelled lemony? Maybe that's a Beta feature.

10 comments:

Neel Mehta said...

I feel like I should stick up for Janelle. She is most certainly not "a lowly furniture designer." If anything, she's high most of the time.

Also, I know that you have magical programming skills, but I'd still be very impressed if Sitemeter reported any numbers for you. Over at Brevity, Blogger Beta does not play well with others, so my Sitemeter stopped working altogether.

Could be worse. Someone on my blogroll has had all past comments deleted. (They should resurface if she switches back to Blogger Alpha, though.)

Unknown said...

It was the sparkle. You wanted the sparkle.

I have to log in--yet again!--to post this comment. (That's 30 keystrokes.)

I just might have to switch back.

Oh, and Neel... never mind.

Hey, check out this WV:
..........
tugjrluz (tug jr's luz): JR-me, luz-Spanish for light. It's a command, people. Do I know what it means? No. But I'm guessing it means you better be nice to me, or else my light, my sparkle, will hunt you down.

Miss Misse said...

Whatever it is you choose to do, you have a great blog, I enjoy it, others enjoy it and I'm sure you're roll will be up again! How is it that you can check how many visitors you've had each day?

Mike said...

Neel, I'm definitely getting Sitemeter numbers. I messed with the template HTML a bit yesterday and maybe things are better now. Who knows. Computers are a mystery to me.

JR, that's really bizarre about the constant relogging in. Maybe you've accidentally told your browser not to save that username/password?

Miss Misse, thanks for the kind words. As for checking my site stats, there are a bunch of different web sites that allow you to install some HTML/javascript into your blog so that they can track your stats for you. I use www.sitemeter.com. Their instructions are pretty good, although I'd be careful if you have upgraded to the Beta nonsense yet.

Will said...

One thing that happened with the upgrade to beta was that the URL naming convention has changed, most noticeably with the archives.

An immediate effect would be Google results might be pointing at old pages that no longer exist.

Mike said...

Hey Will, that's an interesting theory. I know that at least some of my google results are coming in to see old pages, but usually I get two flavors of those: some to specific posts and some to a month-long archive page. The latter don't seem to be appearing.

My hits are more normal today though. Oh well. I'll live.

Linda@VS said...

I've been wondering whether upgrading to Beta is a good idea. Think I'll wait a while and see how it works out for you.

Mike said...

VS, it actually seems to work fine for me (ignoring the drop in hits I'm still sort of seeing), but I'd hold off unless you're motivated to use the new labels feature or one of the whizzy new template designs.

Leesa said...

Make it smell like chocolate :)
You'll get alot of lovin' then!

Mike said...

Leesa, we'll all just have to wait for scratch-n-sniff web pages. The possibilities are endless.