I suspect that a most readers have been on youth mission trips, etc, and without internet access more than usual lately. I was in Hungary for 12 days, home for one day, then out of town again for the past 4 days attending the CBF General Assembly.

Your question reminds me of a curiosity I’ve had for a while: how are RSS feed hits counted (or not)? When I view a long list of new posts, does a site like yours count several hits at once? Or do you chaulk up hits only when I click on the full version of a post?

scott — i use sitemeter (see the link on the left sidebar of my template), and it measures visitors, not hits. hits, in its true meaning, has come to mean almost nothing, since — as you imply — hits are every file opened on a page (so one visit would provide multiple hits on a blog or site with lots of graphics and such). i THINK sitemeter measures “unique visitors” as opposed to counting repeat visitors (i’m not sure about this, but i tested it once by going to my blog about 50 times in a short period of time, and it didn’t change the sitemeter count at all).

I’ve been visiting your site less for several reasons. 1, I have been out of town and previously busy. 2, your RSS feed switched to excerpts only. 3, because of the RSS issue, you have to catch my attention in the first 30 words, or I don’t end up clicking through. Generally speaking, I unsubscribe from anybody who does not do full RSS feeds, but your content in the past has made it worth keeping. BUT…if you could switch back to full content in your feed…that would be AWESOME! Since you don’t have ads on your site, their does not seem to be an advantage to only publishing excerpts. You can track RSS readership through feedburner if you are concerned with people not getting tracked.

chris — i actually saw a good increase in visitors when i went to excerpts. prior to that, none of the bloglines subs were registering as visitors, because they never clicked through.

Marko…You know me, I love simple and I am still visiting everyday. Even when I am at camps and my precious wireless doesn’t work, I still find a way.

Mark,

I think its just summer. :-)

hehe..readership.
glorious.
i like the fun stuff as well as the deep thinking.. although I think that my blog has been suffering from ‘can’t register deep thoughts-itis’. I’ve even been reading a Clive Cussler novel cos it’s about all I can cope with right now.

Marko now is the time to drive traffic up with shots of you in that thong bro.

Could be the youth worker summer psychocalendar. Have you checked out SmarterStats??

My web guys have me tracking my Sacred Ink tattoo and my blogs site with it and it is pretty accurate. It gives tons of details and reports. It will give you views, visits, hits, geography, unique visitors and stats for what people are reading and what they aren’t on your site. This might help you tune in your content (or you could go youthguyho and try the thong photos). I’ll try to find the link for it and get it to you.

Chuckk

re my last comment) –Found it !

http://www.smartertools.com/Products/SmarterStats/Overview.aspx

one other thing im using for subscriptions that works well is feedburner it gives the whole file and pictures and all I dont know if this will help but here’s what it delivers

Maybe you have just seen your family more, so they do not need to check the site to see what you have been up to. Have you been home more then usual lately? :)

Hey, I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off at work and home. Keeping track with you Marko, just rarely have time to comment. Oh yea, thanks for the posts. It feels very positive to have someone to regularly read & lurk.

I just think it’s summer. Traffic on the forums is down by about 20% since June 1. Like others have said there are oodles of people on mission trips, at denominational conferences, on an on.

But I’m all for the thong idea too.

I also would appreciate full-length RSS entries again. I find I read less of what you write because it’s an extra step to actually click the link to come here and read. It’s eaiser for me to just have everything in one place. I also agree with Chris that if I skim through the first couple sentences and it’s not of extreme interest to me, I don’t come here to read the rest of it, whereas before I’d usually read through the whole thing either way even if it only mildly interested me.

Marko,

I have to post as another person asking for full rss entries. I still click through if I want to read comments for an article or post a comment myself. But I much prefer to just use my rss reader.

Since best I can tell you are not serving any ads, are not making these posts to fund anything, why not look for ways to make sure as many people read your content as possible instead of as many people visit your site is possible?

Marko,
I am a new visitor and plan on visiting when I can. I appreciate the deep stuff as well as the fun stuff. I am a first time pastor with a whole bunch of years of youth ministry experience. I will visit as often as I can along with a few other blogs to try and keep my worldview as large as possible.

Hi Mark,
I was googling myself, of course…found your blog and just wanted to say, from one oestreicher to another I dig what your doin’ my brother!