Feedjit

I was reading my friend Mike’s blog, The Top of Texas Gazette, the other day and he had found this very cool widget from Feedjit. Its a live traffic feed widget to add to your website, and though its not giving you as much information as a full fledged tracking tool such as Google Analytics, its really a great tool to see quickly where your traffic is coming from and it works very close to real time, well with each page refresh. Mike’s always having some really clever finds posted to his blog as well as a lot of humour, good music, great photo blog posts and even the serious posts as well, a little something for everyone there in the panhandle of Texas, so have a look sometime. ;) Tell him G sent you

The widget is easily customised to incorporate it into your own site or blog. Its a handy tool to see at a quick glance where your traffic is coming from. As he mentioned in his post, he knows where his friends live so he can see at a glance who has dropped by and the same with me, If I see a hit from Lemesos, Cyprus, and I know fairly well thats my baby or one of her friends, and of course Amarillo, Texas is likely Mike. But generally the cities that show are I am guessing where the local traffic from the surrounding areas is routed to. For instance I know he doesnt live in Amarillo, just its the closest relay to him. (I dont know if relay is the correct term but I’m using it ;)! ) Its pretty neat and pretty accurate too. The only thing I can see is it only will show where you came from if you actually select a direct link form some site, just typing in the address wont show up, neither will it show where you left off to unless its a link on the site you are on. . Well its still a great tool I think and I was going to add it to our site on blogger, but my baby beat me to it! Oh she’s getting good now with this sort of thing :) Well I like to think I am teaching her some things , but I think she picks up things a lot better than she lets on ;) It doesnt seem to add much time to loading a page either which is nice, as I already probably have just a few too many things there in the right column as it is increasing the load times and the overall consensus is already saying WordPress is a bit slow to begin with.

I mentioned above about it not showing actually the city you are living in but where the connection is made to the internet. In my case I live very near t the coast of northeastern North Carolina in a town called Grandy. the first time I saw the feed on Mike’s site it has me in Raleigh, NC and yesterday it was showing me in Kenly, NC and today its saying Lillington, NC. Well I have never even heard of either Kenly or Lillington!Well I had to look them up then to see where they were.

This pin on the far left is Lillington, the next one to it is Kenly and the one in the upper right is where I actually live so you can see its really not so accurate but only to a good size area. Not that it makes a difference really as you know generally when its someone you already know pretty well.  (I love this map feature in Live Writer by the way)

The biggest advantage it has is you can see at a glance when you have had some hits from say a search engine or another blog and what people are actually reading on your site.

Meanderings friends, Live Writer, Tech, web tools, widgets