Real time visitor tracking (non-JavaScript) for blogs

The first post in the series is Visitor tracking on wordpress.com blogs. The benefits of having real time stats data are knowing who your reading audience is and being better able to target your content to meet their needs. Many bloggers like to install real times stats on their blogs, and some like wordpress.com bloggers, cannot use JavaScript counters on their blogs. Below you will find three free non-Javascript real times stats choices that can be made, and if you click through to the sites you will find more specifics.

A simple breakdown of what the data includes is answers to the following questions:

• How many people are on my website right now?
• Who is visiting my website?
• What countries do  my visitors come from?
• Which posts are my visitors reading?
• How many visitors do I get within one or several days?
• How much time do my website visitors spend reading my web pages?
• How popular is my site?

ClustrMaps

Visitors don’t need to click on anything: just viewing your page is sufficient. We provide (free) the HTML that gives you a tiny map, like the ones below. When it loads, it increments a counter and shows the locations of all visitors to your page, cumulatively (even for huge numbers). Clicking on it zooms in to a big world map, and (optionally) lets you zoom in to the continents. For light users (under 2500 visitors daily) the service is free, forever, and stores cumulative totals up to millions of visitors. Paying users get extra features.

Creating your ClustrMap account is easy. You simply supply the url for your site and an email address (for receipt of your password for signing into Admin), and get a copy of the code to paste into your site.

Instructions for how to add the code below to your site are provided on site. Choose one of the styles below and copy and paste it into a text widget on your site.

[A] Recommended (good for most users)

[B] Minimalist (for MySpace and other sites needing the plainest HTML)

There are two other options as well:

[C] Advanced (for those requiring true W3C XHTML1.1 validation)
[D] BBcode syntax (for BBCode / Wiki / Last.FM and other sites needing it)

feedjit

Go to the feedjit site and click the widget’s tab:

Feedjit provides the widgets  free of charge and they all have an incredibly simple 2 step cut-and-paste installation. You don’t need to register to get the widgets,  you can simply grab and go!

To install any of the widgets, simply cut and paste the Javscript for the widget you would like into your blog side-bar. Or if you are a Blogger or Typepad user, you can simply click the links we provide to instantly install the widget on your blog.

WordPress.com, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces, LiveJournal and Hi5 users click to get our Non-Javascript Live Traffic Feed.

HTML feedjit code for wordpress.com blogs, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces, LiveJournal and Hi5 users > http://feedjit.com/joinimg/

Step 1: Customize It! (Choose your color scheme, widget width,  and the maximum number of entries to be displayed.)

Step 2: Copy the code into your site HTML or into a text widget.

We also offer a Twitter Widget for all you Twitter addicts out there.

whosamungus UPDATE:  December 23, 2009

Hi everyone, Christopher from whos.amung.us here.

Great to hear there is interest in our new widget, but the downside is that is requires Javascript, and, as we all know, JS is a no-go on hosted WordPress blogs unfortunately – we’d love to have hosted WordPress users using it believe me!

If you need pure HTML code for your WordPress blog, shoot us off an email at http://whos.amung.us/contact/general/ and just let us know your site URL and what widget you want (the original, custom color, and small widgets are currently embeddable in hosted WordPress blog but nearly all features including the visitor map will still work).

Feel free to fire off any other suggestions, we always love to hear from our users!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Christopher
whos.amung.us

Here are the instructions for wordpress.com bloggers and others who require HTML only (non-JavaScript) widgets:

1. Email the whosamungus site to get the HTML (non-javacript) code you require for the button.
2. Log into your wordpress.com blog and go to -> Dashboard ->Appearance -> Widgets. Drag a Text Widget out of the Available Widgets box and drop it into in the sidebar box in the position you want it to appear in the sidebar.
3. In the larger space below the title for the Text widget paste in the code you copied.
4. Click “Save” and the “Close”.

Here’s the bottom line
Sitemeter, Statcounter, wordpress stats and all the others (getclicky, whosamungus, clusrtrmaps, feedjit, etc.) will never agree. Each one of them decides how and what they will count as a hit. Some count page views and some count unique visitors. Therefore, use any of the stats counters only as a general guide to hits.

Understand that an application that is not running on the same servers your blog is on is going to be susceptible to wild fluctuations. This is because all hits have to be transferred over the internet to different servers, and there are literally thousands of things that can go wrong between the server your blog is on and the server at the stats place.

Also be aware of the possibility that the software or hardware at the stats place may be broken and not recording, or counting things as intended.

Discussion question:
Do you use one of these free real time visitor tracking widgets on your blog? If so, would you like to share any feedback about the one you use with other bloggers?