Technical issues
Thought I’d take a few minutes to comment on the services that I’m using to run this blog.
I’m hosted on Typepad, which is the hosted service from the creators of Movable Type. I’m coming to the end of my 90-day free trial, and I’m definitely going to continue with them. I wanted a service that would let me blog without having to get elbow deep into HTML, and it does that, without any hassle at all. I haven’t fiddled much with the layout, but you can, and my friend who uses a screen reader tells me that it works well for her.
The only thing that I’ve been less than thrilled with is the statistics and referrals page, which only tells you how many page hits you’ve gotten, and makes no attempt to tell you how many visitors you’ve had. So I’ve signed up with StatCounter, a free service that provides more detailed tracking. I know there are other services that do this, but this is the first one that I found that I could figure out how to implement with Typepad.
I’ve signed up with BlogExplosion, which is a service designed to help you increase the traffic to your site. The idea is that the more you surf other members blogs, the more they get sent to visit yours. I’m somewhat dubious as to whether any of the people sent to my site are staying around for more than the required 30 seconds, but it’s been fun to play with. I find it quite fascinating to see what people feel compelled to blog about.
October 24th, 2004 at 11:20 am
Oh a few of us hang around for longer than the required 30 seconds – I have come to enjoy the variety of things people blog about that I see via BE… it’s good to get off the blogroll and out into the wilds of the blog-o-sphere 🙂
October 24th, 2004 at 2:32 pm
From Blog Explosion here as well… yeah, I don’t just click to click past anyone, I read what people feel the need to write about. 🙂
October 28th, 2004 at 11:10 am
hey, glad i came across ya from the BE (i just signed up, literally, 10 minutes ago)… whereabouts are you in DC? we live in baltimore now, having been priced out of the DC housing market, but my husband works in DC (AdMo).
oh and hello! nice to meetcha!
January 12th, 2005 at 9:00 pm
I’m another typepad user, but unlike you, haven’t been able to figure out how to put the code in the right spot. If you’re feeling charitable, I’d love some tips.
January 12th, 2005 at 9:41 pm
The trick is to set up a typelist for things like this (on mine it’s called Blog Related Links). Then go to advanced configuration, select “show notes as text,” and then put the HTML code into the notes field. This works for the statcounter code, as well as blog rings.