Me and my stats, you and your stuff

My site statistics have been telling me things. We've had a meeting, and the statistics told me that The People (that read my blog; you get a capital T and P) need to know a few rudimentary web geek things, which is good, because the only web geek stuff that I know is rudimentary.

The first thing my site statistics told me today was there was a person who spent THIRTY EIGHT MINUTES this morning searching my site for "liver shaped mug". Now, if this person had paid attention, s/he would have noticed that the post in question popped up on the initial search page. But it got me and my stats thinking: This person really could have been helped by Google's site search, so that, instead of going back and forth between the initial Google results and clicking on almost every post on my site trying to find the information, they could have just typed "site:areseven.com liver shaped mug" to search only my site and quickly find that I didn't really have the information they were looking for. I'm not really sure that even that would have helped the liver mug searcher, but if you didn't know you could do this, dear faithful readers, consider it a tip from me to you.

Speaking of faithful readers, the line graph on the visits to my site has gone into Everest mode this past week. Either you're finding the topics of discussion absolutely fascinating, or you're very, very bored. It's not that I don't love the fact that you all come back here over and over again, but there's a way that you can simplify your life, and that's with an RSS reader.

A couple of you have already done it, some of you are resistant, some of you don't know what the hell I'm talking about. For the latter group, an explanation: it's a way to get notified when one of the blogs you read gets updated. It can save you an extraordinary amount of time, because once you've spent 10 minutes setting up the blogs you read regularly, you don't have to constantly check them throughout the day to see when it's been updated. You do have to check them regularly for new comments, though, so it doesn't take all of the fun out it.

The two blog readers (both web-based) that I use are these:

Google Reader
Still in beta phase, the Google Reader is still a little clunky (which is unusual for Google apps), but it works fine for basic blog-checking purposes. If you're including newspaper feeds in it, I would imagine it would get annoying, but if you have 20 or so blogs that you look at on a regular basis, it's nice to get them all in one place at one time. I'm hoping that Google can spruce it up a bit with features, but as it is, it suits my purposes just fine. Plus, it hooks in with your gmail account, which is handy.

Bloglines
I just started using bloglines today, and so I still haven't gotten used to it. It seems like it has a decent amount of features that Google doesn't have (yet) like the ability to group your blogs into different folders, but it also seems a little harder to use, and some of the initial features are pretty frustrating (example: when you look at a new post, click away and then click back, the page goes blank and you have to select "Show last 24 hours" to see it again). But it looks promising, has more features than Google and has a name that sounds similar to "Bloodlines", which is fun.

Once you have one of those set up, you just bookmark it and then come back every now and then, have it check all your blogs at once, and then (ahem) go back to work instead of clicking on every single link on the blogrolls of the ones you read. I also find it's really useful for those blogs that don't update very often.

Any other good RSS readers that the already-knowledgeable use?

Of course, no reader helps when certain bloggers don't turn on their RSS feeds.

Thus concludes this lesson in rudimentary web stuff. I hope it was helpful, I hope you have a good weekend, and I wish you well on your daring secret CIA mission to the Chilean mountains. Oops. Sorry about that last bit.