Tracking Hits on My Blog

Did you ever wonder who was reading your blog and where they live?

FeedJit will provide you with the answers. It's a free widget you can get at http://feedjit.com that provides you with data on visitors to your blog in any of four formats: Live Traffic Feed; Recommended Reading; Page Popularity; and Live Traffic Map, an example of which you can see in here in the sidebar.

Widgets for Blogger and many other blogs and social networks are available and install as Javascripts in one or two clicks. The newest widget works with Twitter. All the modes except Live Traffic Maps include live links back to the visitor's site.

Try it , You'll Like It

If you haven't tried Bing, the new Microsoft search engine, you're missing a valuable new tool. The user interface and the compiled search results differ substantially in format from those of Google in several ways, mostly positive. It works well with Firefox, too, and you can drag a Bing search box into the Firefox tool bar providing you with direct access to searches on either or both Bing and Google.

Why use two search engines? Because their results ranking schemes are different and you will get two different lists by relevancy. Try it and see which results you find the most useful.

Based on your pattern of selected search results, Bing will pull up new results automatically, making it possible to narrow your search on the fly without adding terms. You can achieve similar results with Google by using the Firefox Surf Canyon add-on, but if you are uncomfortable downloading add-ons, Bing's all-in-one approach is the better choice.

When I use Bing, since I already have the Surf Canyon add-on installed in Firefox, I get suggested hits from both Bing and Surf Canyon with some overlap, but not enough to get rid of one in favor of the other.