Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Ok, I’ve been writing this blog for almost two years now and I thought it was about time to get an impression of how my users are accessing the content here. I know that some of you read entries on your web browser as I get traffic reports from Blog City as well as SiteMeter. I also get a sense of how many people may be subscribing to my RSS feeds, at least those who use Bloglines, because it tells you how many subscribers there are for a given feed – in my case there seem to be 28 at last count, excluding myself and counting all the various RSS feeds that I have set up. I also apparently have a whopping 4 people who have signed up with Blog City to receive email notifications when a new entry is posted (note: see below if you want to subscribe to this list).

As many of those who write blogs know, except for Bloglines, it’s very difficult to get statistics on how many people are subscribed to your blog via a news reader. This is due to the nature of RSS and aggregators which collect the content and distribute it, kind of like a middleman. So unlike a website, you are not getting people to come individually to access your content and so have no idea how many people may be looking.

So, with that said, I thought I would ask all you folks out there to fill in my visitor poll in the upper right corner of my site. If you’re reading this via a newsreader, just follow this link to my site. I’ve made it so that you can specify more than one method. For example, while I use Bloglines a lot to read content, I also use the newsreader software for my Treo 650 phone, QuickNews.

Don’t worry about filling this out if you just happened across this site today but don’t subscribe to one of the feeds or otherwise check the site every once in a while.

I really appreciate your taking the time to help me figure out how my readers are getting the content. In the future I hope to have other polls that will be a little more interesting and will let me get to know you better.

* If you want to get email notifications, you can do this by entering your email address in the text box on the left next to the “?” button, under the “GetFirefox” Button and “Mailing List” banner text. After typing in your address, click the “>> >>” button.