News Feeds and other Site Info

Tech: I recently installed Google Analytics, so I can get an idea of what you all do on this website, and how I might be able to improve it. As an aside, Google Analytics is an order of magnitude better than any site analysis tool I've used. The Google folks have perhaps the most elaborate and effective use of AJAX I've seen on the web. Among other things, I get to see which links people are using, how they enter the site, how often they simply bounce back out, where they come from, geographical maps, etc.

One of the things I learned is that many of you aren't using RSS feeds, but are periodically visiting the site (mostly by Googling for Chalo Bolo). That's not a bad thing, if I were a more diligent poster, but I suspect many of you get mildly annoyed to find out that I haven't posted in a while. So I recommend using a consolidated viewer like Bloglines; with a blog lines, or similar account, you can keep all the news, blogs, etc. that you read at one URL, then you can automatically see which of your sites have new content, summaries of the posts, etc. You can usually simply add the URL of your sites, and almost every site, including blogs and more popular sites like the NYT, Christian Science Monitor, etc. all support RSS feeds.

Another thing I learned, is that many of you are repeatedly following the Topic links off to the right of this post, which is great. For those of you who have not, I'll briefly explain. For each post I make, I tag the post w/ certain classifications, like: Life, Politics, Movie Reviews, etc. The links off to the right point to these posts. If all you're interested in are Movie Reviews, than you can simply follow that link and avoid the rest. And of course, if you're interested in all of it, you can ignore this advice all together!