Who's Reading This Blog?

I don't host this blog site, consequently I don't have access to the logs to analyse activity on the site. However, that doesn't mean that I can't monitor blog activity, and indeed, let all of you analyse the activity of this blog.

This is an old trick really. I have simply embedded an tag in my profile that has a reference to http://EasternMining.com.au/blogs.gif That resource does not exist, but it requests my own web server, which I have an automated process to add logs to a publicly available cube. You can see lots of real-time web log analysis demonstrations on my home site http://RichardLees.com.au/Sites/Demonstrations

So you and I can view how many people are reading this blog, when and where they are reading from. See Blog Activity or navigate there from the "Web Performance" page of the "Web Analytics" dashboard on my demonstrations site. Ignore all the graphs, except the chart at the bottom left of the page. This chart is showing the number of visitors by Geography for the last 60 days. It's only showing about 10 days today, since I added the tag in on December 11. You don't have to stop there, since the graph is presented by Microsoft PerformancePoint, it is interactive and you are able to drill down further, change chart type etc. for example, here is a sorted list of client IP addresses. You can ask for exactly the same, and you will be able to find your own IP address in the list from when you read this blog. Because, whenever you go to this page, you make a real-time query to the web logs cube.

I would like to point out that I have added this functionality simply to provide an interesting live demonstration. I don't have any particular reason to know anyone's IP address. Although having said that, this might be a useful reminder to many people of the tracks they are leaving behind on the Internet.

Richard

http://richardlees.com.au/