Performancing

I’m a stat junkie. I love all sorts of stats. And lists. And stats about lists. Or lists of stats. When it comes to well-ordered information about just about anything, I’m all over it. So it probably comes as no surprise that I wanted stats about our blog visitors. I was just curious about what the three of you were reading while you were here.

I went to Google analytics and managed to set up their stats for our site. But I didn’t realize at first that Google doesn’t seem to make any distinction between the three of you and my 1,800 visits per day to the site. There I was getting all involved in the Google Stats when come to find out they were mostly just me. Finally I figured out how to exclude myself and felt like I deserved a Medal of Honor for figuring it out.

So I went to WordPress and down-loaded a couple of stats plug-ins. I managed to get them uploaded to the server and activated, but one of them only seems to be partially working and I never could get the other one to work at all. I went to their help page and they were talking about “scripts” for “building the databases” on your “sqL something.” I didn’t even understand enough to know how to ask what the hell they were talking about.

Then I stumbled across… (insert sound of heavenly angels in the background) stats called pMetrics by Performancing which is a blogger’s-friend educational type web-site and also an add service. They are brilliant. I mean here’s what happened after I registered for my free trial. They said, “Copy this red code right here” and “Put it in your Footer page if you have one right above the /body tag.” Seriously, it was that easy. And the stats were up and running.

I have only had them a few days so I can’t even tell you everything they include. I can tell you simply from browsing that they appear to be the most in-depth and well-ordered stats I’ve seen. Everything is neatly categorized so its easy to find what you’re looking for. They have all the normal stats you would expect and some things I never imagined. Like you can check your site in real-time. So we can log-on to our stats dashboard and see what Stace’s mom is reading while she’s on the site.

Seriously, you can tell how many of your visitors are coming from a bookmark or a link, or if they are coming from a directory you’re enrolled in, or from a search engine. Apparently we get quite a bit of traffic from the search phrase “stupid trucker jokes” which is kinda appropriate I guess. I can see if you were using your site as a money-making tool how these stats could be invaluable. The one negative I do have to say about Performancing is that they don’t appear to keep up to date on questions posted on their forums or respond quickly to their e-mails. But maybe I just got unlucky and that’s not typical. I don’t know.

Because of finally having working stats, we learned that most of you were browsing us — well trying to browse us – with Firefox. We didn’t have Firefox but I was curious so I downloaded it to check it out. As it turned out unless I have some settings wrong on Firefox our site was virtually impossible to make out on it. So I started looking around for a new WordPress theme. When I stumbled across (again with the angels sound) Nightlife again by Performancing.

Well. I loved it instantly. I mean its so clean and sharp. Stace liked it immediately, too, although she did question if it were perhaps “too classy” for us. My thought was screw that I love it. So we uploaded it to WordPress and off we went. Now here’s where it is going to get crazy. You know I am still semi-retarded on this HTML and CSS stuff, right? Well I have tweaked several different themes now and basically it has just been like poking blindly at some section of the code then going to the site to see if anything happened.

Not Nightlife. When I opened up the code in the theme editor I was stunned. Each little section of the code is clearly labeled and distinct. I can’t really explain what I mean except that I didn’t have any trouble at all finding out where a particular part of the site was controlled and how to change it. The code is beautiful. Now…. I still haven’t figured out how to make the text blocks on the sidebar not be a list, but that’s my bad.

I haven’t really explored their whole site, but I recommend if you are new to blogging you go visit these Performancing guys. Who knows what all they have available to help? And if you are an old pro with lots of visitors, you would probably love their stats.