Friday, January 2, 2009

Live Traffic Feed (and other Gadgets)

NOTE: MORE INFORMATION ADDED ON 06 January. SEE PURPLE TEXT AT END OF THIS TOPIC.

You may have noticed something new that has appeared in the right-hand column recently.

The "Live Traffic Feed" lets us know the town and country of the last ten folks who accessed this Blog. When you surf the Blog look down the right-hand column and you should see your location listed.

Mine is Lady Lake, Florida (my address is The Villages, Florida but I guess my Internet Service Provider is in nearby Lady Lake).

I am pleased to see someone from Lisbon, Portugal and someone else from Palermo, Sicily, Italy have been here in the past day. Also someone from Blookfield Hills, Michigan (Steve Ruberg?) and Palo Alto, California.

Over the past week I even saw Rabat Morocco, Brisbane Australia, Singapore, Winnipeg Canada and other places in the US including California and Massachusetts and Washington (both the State and the District). If you click on the Watch in Real Time hyperlink in the Live Traffic Feed gadget you will see a long list of hits, including the Topic they were attracted by.

HEY YOU UNIDENTIFIED LURKERS - PLEASE POST A COMMENT!!!

You may also notice a link where you can see the most recent Dilbert comic strip. It is one of my favorites.

There is also a world map with most countries on it. Just roll your cursor over any country and the name should pop up. If you click you should get news from some website in that country.

There is also a dictionary link where you can type any word you find and get a definition. If you click on the little triangle, you can direct your query to a specific dictionary or to Google or other sites including Wikipedia.

The items in the right-hand column are called "Google Gadgets" and they have advertisements in them. However, I am not earning any money from the advts.

ADDED 06 JAN: I've changed the Live Traffic Feed that appears in the right-hand column to a different version that gives more information. In addition to country flag and name of city and state, it indicates where the person came from and on which Topic he or she landed.

If you click on the Watch in Real Time hypertext at the bottom of the Gadget, you'll get even more information about visitors to this Blog. This includes the time of arrival and departure, the browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, etc.), the operating system of his or her PC (Windows XP, Windows Vista, Apple OSX,etc.), the refering website (Google, Blogger, FeedJIT, etc.).

If they arrived as a result of a search on Google, it tells exactly what phrase they were searching for. This means whenever you access a website they can obtain all this information on you. So, next time you do a Google search for "femme fatal catfight' and get linked to the ASPCA website, they will know what your real interests are :^)

I also added a Live Traffic Feed Gadget to the website for my free online novel http://www.2052hp.blogspot.com/. I was pleased to see I have several visitors there each day. Many have been referred from my listing at http://free-online-novels.com/ where 2052 - The Hawking Plan is listed as the second item in the Science Fiction section. Over the past two days I've had visitors from Australia, Ireland, China, the UK, Belgium and Malaysia, as well as from a few states in the US.

Ira Glickstein

1 comment:

Stewart A Denenberg said...

Yes, Google gadjects are quite cool.
I have on a side toolbar for the phase of the moon, a calendar, the stock market, a dictionary etc. And, like Ira, Dilbert is my favorite comic strip right up there with Zits.

Stu