There a number of ways to find out the answer. My hosting provider has some basic reports by a program called Webalizer. These reports show that last week (February 14 through February 21), Living Well With Diabetes had 1516 page views. I’ve been a bit unhappy with those reports because provides only cumulative numbers of hits and page views on a daily, monthly and annually. Those cumulative numbers don’t differentiate between hits and page views by real people and those of automated web crawling programs such as Googlebot, Msnbot, and Yahoo! Slurp. I only care about the visits by real people because, well, I’m pretty sure none of the web crawlers have diabetes.

I finally got curious enough about my web site statistics that I installed a module on my web site to collect more detailed data. I did that about a month ago and I immediately noticed three things:

1. The module still collects all the visit data from web crawlers and there are a huge number of web crawlers scanning my web site. So many that it’s difficult to find the stuff I’m really interesting in. That is, the visits from real people.
2. The amount of data is large enough that it won’t be practical to collect it for very long.
3. The collecting of the data seems to slow down the web site.

Because of this, just over a week ago, I signed up for Google Analytics. By the nature of how it collects its data, it automatically excludes the visits by web crawlers. It still collects a large amount of data, but because the data is stored on my Google Analytics account where I don’t have a storage space limit, it doesn’t take up space where it counts: on Living Well With Diabetes.

I’ve been collecting data with Google Analytics since February 14 — just over a week. So, after excluding all the visits by web crawlers, the number of page views by real people is…wait for it…129.

Yep, 129 page views spread across seven days and five postings. And 59 of those 129 page views weren’t even to new postings on the site; they were to my Quotes page. Clearly, if I want this blog to be more than just a fancy electronic letter home to Mom, I need to get the word out about Living Well With Diabetes. How does one go about promoting a blog? More on that later.