blog

On Wednesday, I received an invitation to sign-up for Measure Map. Measure Map is a stats package for blogs.

Rather than just giving a bunch of statistics that your web server collects about your site, Measure Map understands blogs, and so interprets stats and collates them in a very simple interface.

The four main views are Visitors, Links, Comments and Posts. Each view shows you the stats for that category and relates that to the average for your site. In addition to those views are a page each for browsers, countries and times.

One nice features is that the Links section shows links out not just links in. i.e. what people click on your site.

Setup is relatively easy. The product is in alpha so there is not a comprehensive help section (nor could I find a user forum). But the info about adding the required code to your site, seemed simple enough to adapt to TextPattern (they don’t give TextPattern specific help). One question for me during setup was, “did I add the code correctly?”. Some sort of mechanism for checking you’ve setup your site correctly might be helpful. If you look at the source for pages with posts on this site you will find a small bit of script under each post and each comment, and a script at the bottom of each page.

I’m trying it on my site, but considering whether it would be useful for the new Church web-site. Because I’m using Expression Engine to build the new TAC site, the site is being built around what is essentially blog software (although more powerful). So, each page/item on the site will have a unique id much like a blog, that could be used by Measure Map.

+Update 8 Nov 2005: A follow-up post.+