Nerve Endings Firing Away

I have been using some new blogging tools that have made life much easier. They are Performancing, Newshutch, and Visistat.

I have discontinued Visistats because after a 7-day trial, it required me to pay almost $120 per year for service continuation. Regardless of how addicted you are to blogging, that kind of money is not justifiable purely for blog stats although the interface is quite cool and extremely user friendly (screen shots after the jump). But if you are a serious blogger earning the big bucks, you could probably do with subscribing to Visistats. They tried offering me a reduced-price deal but anything other than free was out of the question for my little blog. Especially when Google Analytics is free and now is accessible to all those with a GMail account.

The other service is Performancing. Vulturo, who often doubles up as DesiPundit’s tech support guy recommended this tool and I have been hooked ever since. If you are using FireFox like any sensible blogger should, then Performancing is a welcome addition to your browser taskbar. You can download a quick-to-install FireFox plugin. The tool rests silently on the taskbar and pops up in an instant to let you write a quick post. Set up your blogs, if you have more than one and you are good to go. You can compose your posts in WYSIWYG format and save them as notes if you are offline and publish them later. The best part was Technorati tags that I could add on the fly. Definitely recommended for high frequency bloggers. Microsoft’s Live Writer is a neat tool as well but I am sticking to Performancing until they add features like tabs and tagging plugins. Oops, it seems like the tags plugin has already been developed. The requirement for .NET framework sucks though.

I have shifted away from Bloglines (again) and this time, the move might be permanent. Newshutch is an AJAX-powered online feed reader that lets you import your Bloglines feeds in an instant. I like the minimalist interface and ‘vanishing’ feeds once you are done reading them. After featuring on LifeHacker, Newhutch drastically improved their features and moved certain important buttons around. The ‘Add Feed’ button features right at the top of the screen. One hitch is that, it doesn’t detect a duplicate feed and adds the second one anyway. Also, the feeds may not be displayed at once, like Bloglines does once you fire up Newshutch but you aren’t gonna read all feeds at once anyway. As you continue down your feeds list, they eventually show up.

Now in the seven days of my Visistats trial, I managed to unearth some interesting stats for my blog. Mind you, these may only be valid for those seven days, especially the search terms [click to view the larger version]:

The Visistat Toolbar

Page Views

Popular pages

Visitors by states and cities

Visitors by Country (I was really surprised to see India as a distant second)

Heavy FireFox usage among my readers although Macs still are a minority

OK! who has the 1920×1200 resolution monitor?

So it just wasn’t me who was tracking the would-be-but-never-was Hurricane Chris.The TVU player post still remains a hot favorite.Technorati Tags: visistats, performancing, newshutch, blogging tools, web statistics, firefox