Ok, not all of them, but a great chunk of them are. Alexa recently updated their Traffic Stats page to include country information as well as reach.

Though I am an Indian Blogger, this blog has nearly 40% of its visitors coming from the USA. My server logs show me around 50%.

I am surprised though that the number of visitors in India are only 5% and are fourth in the list of countries. Guess very few of my own country members want to read this blog!

What did surprise me is the Traffic Rank which seems to be highest in Belgium at 14,000! India follows with around 16,000 which is some consolation.

Where are you from?

Looking back at 2006, I think the year went well.

It has been a very healthy year for my blog for sure. I hit into the top 100,000 websites on Alexa and today stand in the top 50,000. Good achievement for a small blog of a small person on the WWW

But, I do have a very very fluctuating rank as you can see in the graph above. I know a lot of users believe that Alexa is flawed, and i think so too, but at the end of the day, its the rank that gets the advertisers!

Site visits have increased as well. I have had 143,143 uniques with 214,533 page-views in 2006 according to Statcounter, currently averaging 440 uniques and 675 pageviews. Nowhere where I would like to be, but definitely better than a year back!

The graph above is my visitors in 2006. The spike you see was because of this post, which hit the front pages of reddit and Digg.

My feed subscriptions have increased as well with an average of a little above 100. Sucks when I compare it to most of the other blogs I read!

Now for the personal front I have nothing much to complain about. After I quit my job I have dedicated a good amount of my time to my studies, websites and personal life (in no particular order).
Unfortunately, the academic portion of my life hasn’t been too good. My future wrt MBA is still insecure and that is the only thing I am worried about right now.

I got a few exams lined up so I hope they work out well.

Since the release of my two plugins in the past two days, my site has seen a good traffic surge. Unforunately, neither of these have been dugg or redditted so far so it’s not that much.

It was sufficient to get me a great rank on Alexa for today, viz. 16,752. This is the second highest rank ever (I had 13,000 once before).

So would you like to advertise here?

A few days back Text Link Ads released their Blog Juice Calculator.

It uses number of subscriptions at Bloglines, your Technorati and Alexa rankings and the incoming links from Google to arrive at a figure.

My blog juice as of now is 5.6. I’m sure it will fluctuate a lot as my Alexa rank fluctuates. I noticed a rise in 1 point for a rise in 6000 ranks at Alexa.

What is your Blog Juice?

Comment below and let me know.

This plugin will let you easily display your Alexa traffic button or graph.

Features:

• Generate perfectly valid XHTML code
• Plugin comes with a Code Wizard to generate the code you need to add to your website
• Can be used to generate graphs for any website, not just your blog

Read more and download the plugin »

Overview:

This plugin will let you easily display your Alexa traffic button or graph.

Features:

• Generate perfectly valid XHTML code
• Plugin comes with a Code Wizard to generate the code you need to add to your website
• Can be used to generate graphs for any website, not just your blog
• Monetize your blog by adding your Amazon ID!

Requirements:

• WordPress 1.5 or above

Installing

1. Download The Alexa Traffic Rank Button Generator Plugin.
2. Extract the contents of ald-alexa-button.zip to wp-content/plugins/ folder. You should get a folder called ald-alexa-button.
3. Activate the Plugin in WP-Admin.
4. Goto Options > Alexa Button. If you are upgrading from an earlier version, it is recommended that you click Default Options so as to clean up any old options.
5. Use the Generator on that page to generate the code to add to your template file. Alternatively add <?php if (function_exists('echo_alexabutton')) echo_alexabutton(); ?> to use default options. Default is a Small Traffic Graph of three months.

The Function:

echo_alexabutton()

The following options can be set through Options > Alexa Button:

• Website URL: Enter the web address whose traffic rank you want to display. If a blank string is passed to the function, then this value is used. By default your blog address is taken.
• Your Amazon ID: If you have an Amazon ID, you can enter this here. The ID will be embedded in the code.

The function takes the following parameters:

• $wpURL: The URL whose traffic graph / button you want to display. If blank, Website URL from the Options page is used.
• $AmazonID: The Amazon ID you want to pass. If blank the Amazon ID from the Options page is used.
• $UnitType: Enter t for traffic button, s for stat and g for graph.
• $subUnitType: a, b, c for the different types. Go play around see which you want best.
• $dateRange: Used only for the traffic graph. To be entered as e.g. 3m, 30d, 1y for 3 months, 30 days and 1 year respectively.

Customizing:

Add <?php if (function_exists('echo_alexabutton')) echo_alexabutton(); ?> where you want to display the chat widget.

Note: Using if (function_exists('echo_alexabutton')) in the above code ensures that your blog won’t break even if you deactivate the plugin.

I have also made available the function ald_alexabutton() which has a return value instead of a echo. You can use it as follows:

$str = ald_alexabutton();
echo $str;

Lastly, you can reset to default options by clicking on Default Options. I recommend you do this once during upgrade if you are upgrading from any older version as it will clean up old variables which the plugin used.

ChangeLog:

• 1.0 – Release

To Do:

• WordPress Widget Support
• Save different sets of code for ready use

Downloads

Current Version is 1.0

• Download The Alexa Traffic Rank Button Generator Plugin v1.0

Support the Development

I’ve spent a good deal of time and money developing and maintaining the plugin. If you like the plugin and find it useful and would like to donate something for my work please do click the Paypal Donate button below. The payment is secure. I haven’t filled in any amount. Feel free to donate what you please. Any amount is welcome. Thank you

License

All files and their contents are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Questions or Bugs

Known Bug

WordPress 1.5 (Strayhorn) has a bug which prevents multiple plugins from creating administration interfaces at the same time. If you have another plugin which creates an administration panel under Options, temporarily disable it, configure meebo me Plugin, then re-enable the other plugin. Once configured, meebo me Plugin will operate normally.

If you have any questions or would like to report any bugs then please use the support forum.

I haven’t been very active in the Indian Blogosphere and so missed the entire discussion over Kiruba being the No. 1 blogger in India (according to Blogstreet).

Patrix has expressed his opinion on Popularity in the Indian Blogosphere. He goes on to list several Indian blogs (including mine) according to their Technorati Ranking.

His post did get me thinking.

Popularity can be defined as the quality of being widely admired or accepted or sought after.

But, how does this translate in the WWW? How do we measure popularity? What are the various methods today? Are they reliable?

Technorati

Today, a lot of methods exist for measuring popularity. One, like Patrix pointed out is, to use Technorati’s Ranking.

Technorati ranks blogs based on the number of incoming links. This rank is updated several times a day and only considers active links from the past six months. As of today, Technorati tracks around 50.9 million blogs!
A point to note is that the incoming links don’t just belong to posts or blogrolls, but also from credit lines (e.g. like that of my Connections Reloaded Theme).

Alexa

Another method of gauging popularity is Alexa Traffic Rank.

Alexa’s ranking system has been online from as far as i can remember! Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. They have a page detailing the process.

This is a stark difference from that of Technorati. Having a higher traffic rank is a more accurate sign of your sites popularity because it measures the number of users actually visiting your site.
However, Alexa ranks can be slightly inaccurate because it depends on users of their toolbar.

Topsites

Top Sites are often used to compare the popularity of blogs wrt one another. There are way too many top sites run by way too many people. A few well known ones are Blog Top Sites, Top100 Bloggers, RankingBlogs.com and Indian Bloggers.

While Top100 rates people on the number of votes they receive or the number of users visiting Top100 from the blog (which in my opinion is an highly inaccurate method of rating), the other three rate the blogs solely on the basis of unique visitors (i.e. traffic) which is how it should be!

Feed Subscriptions

A good way of ascertaining popularity is by looking at the number of feed subscriptions. e.g. Feedburner gives you buttons that let you display the number of subscribers to your feed.
This, however can’t be a sure-shot method because you may have a lot of subscribers but no readers. Yet again, this doesn’t track the actual traffic that the site receives.
Additionally, it only tracks those who have signed up for the service and put the code on their site.

No. of Comments

Visitor interactivity in terms of number of comments that the posts receive is another way to find out how popular a blog is. This can also be further used to determining visitor loyalty to understand how many repeat commenters are present.

And yet again, this isn’t the best way, because you could have a lot of visitors who love reading your blog but would not want to comment on it.

To conclude there are several ways to determine blog popularity.
However, all of these methods may not give the same results. So which method should we actually adopt?

Give me your opinion.

Which method would you use from the above?
Do you have still another way of measuring blog popularity?
Or have do you believe that since your blog is personal, you don’t really care about how popular it is?

Join the discussion below or blog about your opinion. And do remember to digg it.

And just a note to us Indian Bloggers. Let’s quit the squabble about who is No. 1 in the Indian blogosphere and look beyond. There is a whole world of bloggers out there.

That’s what my rank is today.

After a lot of waiting my website has crossed into the top 50000 of Alexa Traffic Rankings.

Thanks to all my visitors who made this possible. Can you push me up still further?

Just broke into the top 100,000 websites as per Alexa’s Traffic Rankings.

I have been trying to achieve this for long and finally. I’m hoping this website gets a lot more popular and rises still further.

Will be creating new stats pages on this site for your ready perusal.

My traffic rank at Alexa.com seems to be rising steadily. In the last six months this site has jumped by over 2 million ranks and today is in the top 700,000 based on the last three months average.

The last one week average is well under 500,000 :O

Just goes to show that my blog seems to be getting rather popular.

Well I won’t fool myself in thinking they are here about me because my stats show that but for a few regular readers, the majority of people are here because of my themes, plugins and hacks for WordPress.

But if you are a regular reader, please do make me happy and post a comment below

On the negative side, my ranking at search engines for the keyword Ajay seems to be falling. It has remained constant at Google, but has fallen at both MSN and Yahoo!

Though it does give me great pride to say that my site is in the top five when you search for Ajay, I am well aware that there are only a few who search for Ajay.

I’m waiting and watching and monitoring.