A Creepy Widget I Absolutely Had to Add to My Blog
March 30th, 2008 | Posted in blog 11 Comments »
As I was upgrading to WordPress 2.5 today, I discovered a really creepy widget that I just had to add to my blog.
The Live Traffic Feed Widget from Feedjit allows you to see details about who’s visiting your blog in real-time. If you look in the right sidebar of my blog (lower-right), you’ll see everyone who is reading my blog at the current moment — both what they’re reading and where they’re from.
This kind of information creeps me out a bit, knowing that a handful of strangers are silently looking in my mental windows. For example, as I’m writing this, people in Johor and Ankara (are those places on earth?) are reading posts I wrote months ago. And some guy from Jersey is reading a post on printable to-do lists that’s more than a year old.
Who are these people? Is the content I wrote weeks/months/years ago still valid? Does it have a bunch of typos and outdated perspectives?
Despite my apprehension, I love knowing that people are reading my blog. It’s a lot more fun than simply seeing a Google Analytics report about the number of daily hits.
I’ve also inserted a Most Popular Pages Today widget (also from Feedjit) directly into the single post view of all posts. So while the folks from Johor and Ankara are checking out what they’re checking out, hopefully they’ll also be enticed to view other popular pages on my site (the popularity of those pages being determined by the same viewers.)
This embedded Popular Pages Today widget from Feedjit is a little more alluring than the standard 10 Most Popular posts widget that everyone seems to have in their sidebar.
By the way, another interesting plugin I’ve added is CommentLuv. When people make a comment, their latest post title shows next to their name. Kind of neat, and not nearly as creepy. But also not as fun.
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Tags: Blogging, CommentLuv, Feedjit, Google Analytics, most popular posts, real-time visitors, Statistics
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Consider that the “handful of strangers” is possibly a bit larger than you can see with this widget. Reading your page through an anonymizer I don’t show up on the list at all. Also, when I read through a standard browser, the widget listed me as being in a city 50 miles away from where I actually am. Just thought you might be interested in the limitations…
[...] from Show Real-Time Visitors on Your Site in a Live Feed — Feedjit Widget for Your Blog | I’d Rather Be … on March 30, [...]
That won’t make people paranoid…
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Johor is in Malaysia, South East Asia. Creepy! Yeah… I got a hit from somewhere in small town Turkey and it’s creep me out…. they do read your blog…like i read yours.
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Ankara is a real place…the capital city of Turkey, and site of a U.S. Air Force base (which my father was stationed at).
I, with apologies to the people of Malaysis, had never heard of Johor until another commenter here filled us in (thanks!).
I used both Feedjit Widgets on a blog I maintain on Typepad for a guinea pig rescue, I learned we have a lot of readers from the U.K. and Australia. I liked the Most Popular Pages Today widget, because it showed me what people were accessing in our archives.
“guinea pig rescue” — now that’s something I hadn’t thought of before. i guess there’s a niche for everything out there.
thanks for leaving a comment.
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On feedjit I show up as Ennice from North Carolina; actually I live in Alberta, Canada….so I wonder how acurate this tracking gadget REALLY is??
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I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
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