Boylston Chess Club
The huge spike on my blog was, of course, the result of your entry about Larry Evans and it seems Tempo had crosslinked his latest blog entry to one of my previous entries as well as my expose on Larry Evans.
It was a banner day for my blog. . .I doubt I'll see those kind of numbers again. . .
Hi DG, good topic.
According to StatCounter:
August 2005 - 884 visits
Week 8/31-9/6 - 354 visits
9/6 - 98
9/7 - 39
As for me the only thing that counts is quality. That`s why I don`t follow Susan Polgar blog. It`s simply bad. The blogs I`m reading are placed on the sidebar.
Cheers
Forgot to mention, my visits are excluded
Thanks for pulling me back to earth!! I guess, there's no harm dreaming.
Well, at least now I know, I'm not the only one reading my site. Too bad, im supposed to be on a temporary hiatus.. hehe.. but it almost makes me want to blog something again...
How do you get stats on your blog anyway? 
(showing how technically ignorant I am! lol)
Goran - I added your numbers to the post.
Nezha - Looking forward to your return. I always enjoyed reading your stuff.
SmithMorra - There are lots of free stats programs out there, but beware of those that create pop-ups on your site. The most popular one seems to be SiteMeter (I use it here). All that is involved is signing up for the service and then pasting some HTML code they give you into your template. Typically people place their stats on the bottom of the sidebar or in the page footer.
I'm amazed to see how many Knight's Errant made the list. glad to see they are going strong!
The Knights all do well on the Blogshares list because they cross-link with each other. A typical Knight starts with ~20 links within a few days/weeks of joining the group.
thanks for trying to navigate through the very murky waters of linking in general and and "blogshares" in particular
great post
I was reading Mark Weeks blogging on blogs ( http://chess.about.com/b/a/257246.htm) and navigated here. If you go to his list of top blogs ( http://chess.about.com/od/blogs/ ), you'll see my Chess Journal ( http://batgirl.atspace.com/archives.html ) rated number 3.
But I fall into a funny hybrid genre, similar perhaps to that of Tim Krabbe or Edward Winter, that is bloggish without being a full-blown blog. I started as a blog, but found the medium too restrictive for my purposes. So I resorted to a blog-like imitation. When dealing with chess history, it's not as easy, or as essential, to be topical.
I use StatCounter. Although it's not suppposed to count my own visits, I know it does at times. I think it also counts some repeat visitors as unique. But overall it gives an idea of what's going on. StatCounter tells me I average 1,549 unique visitor/month. Unlike a true blog, everyone of my pages has to contain the code that allows them to be indexed. I don't have code on every page, so I miss recording a lot of hits that come directly to those pages from Google. I think this offsets some of the StatCounter's inaccuracies.
Anyway, my purpose in giving these details is to show that the business of rating and ranking blogs is even more complex and arguable that it already seemed. Not only can we debate how the counting is done, but we can also debate the very nature of a blog.
Since any sort of ranking system based on hits or even udate frequency, especially one derived from Google, tells us nothing about the quality of a blog, it seems that objective measurements are fairly inadequate, while subjective measurements are generaly biased as well as difficult to generate.
I think it's enough that sites like this one and about.com keep abreast of the blogging scene and let folks know where to find these personal chess accounts.
Thanks.
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