Call me vain.  Seriously, go ahead.  Like most people, I look in a mirror when I walk past it.  I guess I am vain when it comes to blogging too.  I really enjoy blogging - writing whatever comes to mind for "people" to read.  But I like to know that there actually are people reading it.  If not, what's the point?  My blog runs on DasBlog, a pretty cool, free blogging engine.  It provides me some cool analytics, out of that box, that tell me how many hits my blog gets and more information.  And yes, I check it often.  I love to know how many hits I get. 

One of my favorite things to do is see the information that I get from search engines.  If someone came to my blog via Google or Live Search, I can see what search criteria they used.  So in the image on the left, I can see that people found my blog for a variety of reasons.  Among other things I can see that some people were searching for me or my blog, someone was looking for information about some National Parks I visited (Bryce and Zion), someone was looking for information about LINQ, and someone was looking for information on my friend Travis.  Also I see that my blog post I Hate Trusted Installer is still popular! 

Well I thought that was cool until I discovered Google Analytics!  Google Analytics is also free and is completely insane.  It gives me tons of information about who reads my blog and now I am addicted to it.  The only problem I have with Google Analytics is that it only gets updated once a day!  With my DasBlog activity information it is updated continually.  Oh well.

So here is what I see with Google Analytics...

This map view is awesome.  It may be tough to tell in this screen shot but it shows a map of the world.  If I get a hit from someone in any country, it turns green.  The darker colors of green have the most hits.  So obviously I get hits from the US, but I also get traffic from India, the UK, Canada, not to mention Romania, Thailand, Spain, Argentina, Lithuania, Belgium, Taiwan and many more!  How cool is that?

I can even "drill down" and see where my traffic is coming from in a specific area, like this map of Pennsylvania.  These maps are really cool but there is much more.  I can see how long people stay on my blog, what posts are popular, what browsers they use and a whole bunch of other information including the same kind of search engine "key word" information described above.  But so far, you identity is safe.  I can't seem to figure out exactly who is reading my blog.  I can't even seem to correlate data between reports, but I there must be a way to do so.  So as for now, I may be able to see what town one of my readers came from, but I can't figure out which pages the reader read.

By the way, Google Analytics is totally easy to include on your pages.  In my case, I just added the script that Google gave me into my dasBlog template: homeTemplate.blogtemplate.  That's all.

Reading Pete's blog I found out about the new version of Windows Live Writer.  It is still in Beta, but now even better with Beta 2.  I'm curious as to why they don't just release this and take away the Beta already.  Anyway...

Right away I noticed some differences (I am posting this with the new version, of course).  The UI is a little slicker.  One of the coolest new features is that you can easily insert and modify tables in a post.  Previously, I had to switch over to html view and put my own tables in.  It was a nuisance.  I also like the way they display the categories now.  Also I just noticed while I am typing this that the spell checking is enhanced.  Check out this list of new features.

One feature that I think needs to be added is support for post descriptions.  My blog runs on dasBlog.  With dasBlog I can put in a description of my post and then only the description shows on the main page with a link to the body of the post.  I'd love to be able to insert the description via Live Writer.  I'll submit my feature request to the team.

There sure are a lot of blogs out there!  Obviously, reading technical blogs is a great way to stay current and learn new things.  The problem is, which blogs to read with limited time.  If you are reading this, you can see some of the blogs I read in my blogroll.  Some of these blogs are from leaders in the industry.  Some of them are local developers that I know and respect.  If you are like me, I try to start the day off scanning through posts (I use RSS Bandit to aggregate for me). If I take a break from coding during the day I may try to read some more.  For some blogs I read only posts that stand out.  For others I read almost everything they post.  Of course it also depends of course on the type of day I am having.

I am happy to say the my blog has been getting a lot of hits lately.  Hopefully that means I have something to offer.  It is pretty cool to look at my statistics and see how people found my blog.  When someone comes to Schwammy Says via Google or Search.Live.com the search engine sends along search criteria that was used.  I love to read through it.  I often think that based on what that person was looking for, I may have helped them.  Sometimes I look and think, oh well, that person probably didn't find what they wanted in this blog.

Anyway, what I'd really like to know is...what blogs do you read?  Please share your ideas.  Marc Ziss turned me on to Sam Gentile's blog.  I started reading it this week and I like his information.  It was a great tip.

A few friends have asked lately about pasting code into blog posts from visual studio.  When you do add code, you want to retain the syntax highlighting features from VS so the code is more readable.  This is a snap with Windows Live Writer.  Live Writer is still considered Beta software but it seems to work pretty well for me.

All you need to do is go to the Live Writer Gallery and check out the cool pluggins that are available.  In this case, I am using the pluggin called "Paste From Visual Studio".

Just install that and in a snap you go from this:

public void dosomething(string anArgument)
{
//this method doesn't really do anything.
string message = "hello world"
DateTime date = DateTime.Now;
}

To This:

    public void dosomething(string anArgument)
    {
        //this method doesn't really do anything.
        string message = "hello world";
        DateTime date = DateTime.Now;
    }

It couldn't be easier!  Now I just need to add some posts to this blog that really use some pasted code!  Check out this other post I wrote about some other cool features of Live Writer.

When I started this blog I continually went to Google to see if I came up in the search.  I did some research and found that you can "register" your URL with Google.  You can go to Google's Add URL page and do the same.  I am not sure if it worked or not.  It could be that Google's spider just reached me on its own.  They make no guarantees that a URL added to the list will even get added to their search.  Also, you can go to Google's Webmaster Tools section.  There you can see when the spider hits your site, find out what queries people use to find your site, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

In my research I also found tips saying that I should include a lot of links in my blog posts.  And also TrackBacks from other blogs would help my ranking with search engines.

I can't tell you if these tips worked specifically.  But I do know that my posts are coming up in Google searches (and other engines too) and I am happy about that!  By the way, some of the other search engines have similar tools to Google.  But you'll have to do a little research on your own to find them.  Don't forget to be a little patient.