Technical Difficulties

When I started this blog (well, actually about a week after I started), I also pasted a tracking code courtesy of Google Analytics into the html portion of the website. I should tell you that it took me quite a while to figure out exactly where to post this code and even longer to actually do it, but I did it, as the message "Receiving Data" indicated on my Google Analytics page. The idea was that by posting this code, I could track who was reading this blog, where they were from and how they were getting to the site. Very cool tools, all for free.

And indeed it was very cool because about 24 hours after I successfully pasted that code, I began receiving data. I checked in periodically to see how many hits the site was getting and soon had generated enough data for Google Analytics to even prepare nice little pie charts with my readership. Not that the numbers were earth shattering--maybe 50 or 60 hits a day at first which generally settled into about a dozen a day on a routine fairly routine basis. Some days more; some less, but always some.

Then a weird thing happened around the end of November: the data stopped. The Google Analytics info always revealed 0 hits. Well, I thought to myself, maybe they are a week or so behind, because the overall graph was still showing the data from the early weeks of the blog. In other words, it wasn't a flat line. Then I forgot to check for a while and when I did check in last week, I noticed that according to Google Analytics, the blog was dead and had been so for some time. A flat line with no hits through the entire month of December.

All of which really was mystifying to me because I had been receiving holiday cards from far flung friends with wonderful comments about the blog. Plus I knew I checked it once a day myself so there had to be at least one hit. And I knew some friends were fairly loyal readers because they sent me emails about it. So what was going on?

Enter my Mac tutorial on Monday, part of the one on one series of tutorials I had signed up for. I brought all my sheets of info from Google Analytics about installing tracking codes and decided to let them figure it out.

And they did. Apparently Google, unbeknown to me, had changed tracking codes at the end of November. The old one that I had installed simply stopped generating data (which was very strange because when I logged onto my Google Analytics page it still said, transmitting date but that is another story...),and so a few clicks later (theirs, not mine), I was back in business.

All of which is a very long way of saying, hang in there. I should know relatively soon how many of you are reading this blog, which seems to be the second question people ask me. I'm not sure I am going to be able to recapture the missing December days, but I'll keep you posted.

It's always good to know you are not alone.