When installing Wordpress via my hosting provider (Dreamhost), they install a lot of themes to. When trying out these, I found the tracking code. Adding the code make it possible to monitor a site’s traffic in detail. For example who visits, for how long and who referred them. For my website these information is not that sensitive, but I still like to be in control.
Don’t get me wrong I respect the people who provide themes for the rest of us deeply, and I would find it okay if it was a condition for using the theme, which I was informed on beforehand. I just find that it a bit too much if this code is put in there on purpose without informing the user.

I’m still pretty new to blogging, and I’m just wondering if this is a common accepted way to go? And what is when it comes to themes, I have not found any information of licenses in the themes I have downloaded? Is it okay to modify and put in ads?

The first worry was what content to put in the blog, and what to call it. As I am shy I decided to base the content on my experience with making things work, since that is what interests me, that be anything from a broken down toaster to a weblog.

After looking in to the free offers from Blogger and Wordpress, I decided that I wanted to do this right and own the domain myself instead of settling with a subdomain. The domain was registered at Godaddy and a hosting account was acquired from Dreamhost (not completely rational I know, if I had thought it trough from the start I had bought it all from one provider).

With Dreamhosts on-click-install I had Wordpress up and running pretty fast, I installed the Blix-theme, but plan to make my own later.

The effort to increase the knowledge of the blog, and increase traffic started Monday, immediately after I published the first post about syncing cell phone calendars. By default Wordpress sends out a ping to a lot of blog directories, besides that I signed op at Technorati and submitted the blog to Yahoo, Gooogle and MSN. The effort to advertise the continued Wednesday when I found a list blog-directories and rss-submission sites, I was just to much in a hurry, resulting in descriptions with errors and that I don’t remember which sites I’ve submitted to an which not.

As I wanted it all, I signed up for Google adwords, in order to get ads on the site to. It took a couple of days for them to approve my application, but Thursday that was up and running to. In the above graph I’ve illustrated the development in the traffic or reffering. This shows that the Blogging-sites gave the initial traffic, and that the traffic from Google seems to be increasing, while the other search engines has not yet provided any traffic.

All in all I’ve had about 250 unique users (not counting bots), I don’t know if that is good or bad after one week, but it is the goal to improve that. When looking at these users I saw that they were from all over the world. Since Firefox users where a vast majority I think it is safe to say, that my blog thus fare has attracted the more geeky part of the internet population. But maybe this ratio will change if I start getting some traffic from MSN and Yahoo?

The big question is; what now?

It’s been good fun, so I’ve decided to keep the Blog for now. I’m not going do a lot to please the search engines. However I will try to improve the content and maybe get a better idea of a target audience. I will keep adding content (although at a slower pace) for the next week or so, and then go on my summer holiday for three weeks. After the summer holiday I will try my first Pay-Per-Click campaign to really increase traffic. But I will probably make a post about that when I get that far.