Monitoring traffic on your blog

Related link: https://wiki.umn.edu/UThink/StatisticsForBlogs

There are many approaches that you could take.

UThink Blog Stats

When you log into UThink, you'll probably see a box in the middle labeled "Blog Stats". It shows the frequency of entries, comments and tags generated across all of your blogs. If you don't see it, scroll to the bottom of your dashboard and look for a "Select a Widget" menu. (Note: there are other widgets to add, but the scope of these widgets are system-wide, not just for your own blogs. This might be a bug.)

If you select one of your blogs, the Blog Stats widget will change to show the frequency of entries, comments and registrations.

Frequency of entries: useful for gauging how active your own contributors are
Frequency of comments: if your blog is set up to accept anonymous comments or comments from anyone in the U, this is useful for external user metrics.
Frequency of registrations: i.e. how many people are signing up to receive regular updates using the MT-Notifier widget (if you've installed it).

But if you're looking for site traffic / hit counts, you'll have to look at one of the other options below.

Third-Party Hit Counters

Below is just a list of ones I've heard of, certainly not an endorsement or a guarantee.

• Google analytics like Urchin (http://www.google.com/urchin/index.html)
• StatCounter.com

You could write your own simple hit counter in PHP as well: http://www.developingwebs.net/phpclass/hitcounter.php

URL Shorteners that offer analytics

These would track how many people follow your shortened URL to your site, and they can capture context information too, like geographic location and where the link was located (website, QR Code, etc.) Again, this is just a list of ones I've heard of or used, certainly not an endorsement or a guarantee.

• Bit.Ly (http://bit.ly/)
• Z URL (only if you're a UofM affiliate) (http://z.umn.edu)

Tracking Use of Your RSS Feed

As mentioned in the first section, UThink already collects the number of "registrations" to receive regular updates. And UThink default templates include an Atom feed, and it's easy to install an RSS feed. You can track "page hits" in the same way that you would a website (but that might be less informative.)

Another method is to use something like Feed Burner. Feed Burner can be used to send regular blog updates to your subscribers in an "email digest" form, and Feed Burner also includes some use data analysis features as well (two clay pigeons, one stone.)