Nerve Endings Firing Away

Let me introduce you to Who’s Amung Us – Sidebar Widget of the Day. Or rather, I should say time-consuming (wasting?) and useless sidebar widget of the day. Well, Of course I kid. I am a known stats whore i.e. love numbers and tracking visitors (new and returning) on this blog. No wonder, this blog’s stats are powered by Mint, Reinvigorate, and Google Analytics. Mint is my primary stats tracker and I check it several times a day; probably more than I should. So much so that I considered it worthwhile spending $30 for a site license (trust me, it is worth it.)

Anyway, I found another stats widget and promptly added it to my sidebar. You can see it if you scroll all the way down or on your left. It tracks and displays the number of visitors that are on your site right now. It tracked visitors that were on my blog until eight minutes ago. If you click on the button, it will show you the pages that the visitors are viewing ranked according to recency. The numbers may vary depending upon when you are reading this (feed readers, you may have to click through to the blog to see it in action.) See screenshot below:

As you see, Sanjaya Malakar brings quite a lot of traffic to this blog these days. No wonder I like write about him ;) You can also see the popular pages on your blog in real time:

The larger text is the more popular pages. The first two links are basically the same pages but one is without the forward slash (/). Reminds me to fix that in the template.

Where can you get it? Who’s Amung Us is developed by Bart Bobrowski, Tom McNulty, and Christopher Shannon. If you go to the homepage (note the clever use of the dot us domain extension, like del.icio.us) it randomly generates a code that you can place on your blog (sidebar or footer is the ideal place.) Simple, right? And yup, they know, it should be ‘among’…hey, in that case, it should be Flicker, right? For compulsive obsessive people (hey, they are talking about me), they have a Firefox addon that lets you check the stats without visiting your site.

It can be pretty addictive to see people wandering into your blog. It is almost voyeuristic except it is your space. I can’t imagine how it must be for high traffic sites. Would it be like a continually streaming river of visitors just scrolling down your page?

Update: This blog no longer hosts the widget.