After reading Bill Caraher’s blog "Monday Metadata" on tracking his hits, I decided I should do the same (And yes, I realize that it looks like I rely quite a bit on Bill’s blog for ideas for mine). I emailed him and found out that he is using Google Analytics for acquiring most of his information. I did a little surfing and it seemed that everyone agreed that this was a pretty good service – and free, can’t beat that. In my surfing I found several sites that explained what to do to set up Google Analytics on a Typepad blog, for example Ed Batista’s blog. I also found an interesting blog by Seth Godin on "How to Misuse Google Analytics." After this research, I decided to take 5 minutes and set up Google Analytics. That’s when things went horribly wrong. No matter what I did, I could not get it to work and when I searched the Internet all I found was web page after web page saying how easy it was to set up. I tried inserting the code and even played around with a widget designed for Google Analytics (Notice the two widgets on the right sidebar). After an hour and a half I gave up and went to teach. To show you how desperate I was, I even resorted to asking my honors core class if anyone there knew about Google Analytics. The first response I got was "Is that some sort of program you losers use in Second Life." Anyway, after class I immediately went back to working on it, and I know you sensible people are asking, Why didn’t you just give up? The only answer I can give is that I refuse to let a computer or a computer program win. Yes, I know that this is stupid and childish, but that’s me. Anyway, over the next hour I tried all of my tried and true computer tricks: cursing at the computer, beating the desk, threatening it, etc. Suddenly it worked and I have absolutely no idea why – maybe the threats worked. Once I got it to work I also added it to the PKAP website. So that’s how I spent most of my day, instead of grading, scanning, writing, or any other productive task.
RSM
Ancient History Ramblings 