Beau Jackson

Hi there, welcome to Beau Jackson’s blog.  My name is Big Brother, and I’ll be watching you today.  You see, I’ve recently taken over Beau’s website and added a little bit of JavaScript so that I can track who’s here using Google Analytics.

Ok, enough Orwellian nonsense.   I did add the Google Analytics code a couple of days ago.  We use Sitemeter for the Spindle And Wheel website, and I like it quite a bit - very easy to use, unobtrusive, free.  The only complaint I have about Sitemeter is that the free version only lets you see info for the last 100 visitors.  If you shell out six bucks a month you get to see info about the last several thousand visitors.  I heard about Google Analytics and thought I’d give it a whirl on my blog since it’s completely free and retains all the information.

It’s gathers all the same info that Sitemeter does, but I’m less impressed with it.  The UI is much less intuitive - you have to dig around to find the info you’re after.  I’m sure that once I get used to it that will be less of an issue for me.  My main complaint so far is that the Google Analytics admin site is over an encrypted connection.  And let me tell you boys and girls, encrypted pages over satellite based internet suck.  Very sloooooow.  My other complaint is that the information is only updated every 24 hours or so, whereas Sitemeter is updated real-time.

All that aside, I find it funny what search terms bring people to my site (my blog and Spindle And Wheel too).  In the last 24 hours I had two new visitors to my site via Google search.  The search terms that brought them to my site: “nordictrack support” and “advertiser for amazon widgets”.  It turns out my site ranks in the top three results for those search terms.  I actually ran the searches myself to see how the heck they related to my site.  Both terms came from reader comments (Jerome on the first one, Marie on the second).  Now that I’ve mentioned those terms in this post, I expect they’ll completely skew the results and put me at number one for those terms!  Buhuwahaha!

So, I think I’ll keep Google Analytics for a little while, just to give it a fair shake, but I may switch to Sitemeter.  I’m really just trying it out because I’m re-doing The Three Ring Ranch site (ported it from Wordpress to Joomla).  We’ve got some sheep for sale and I thought it would be interesting to see who was looking at them, since we’ll undoubtedly be selling more of them in the future.

I’ve got my eye on you!