Jeromy Anglim's Blog: Psychology and Statistics


Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Setting up a Blog on Blogger

Given the number of academics in the world, there are surprisingly few blogs on psychology and research methods. There are many possible reasons. Two barriers are: 1) lack of knowledge of the ease of creating a blog; and 2) lack of knowledge of the benefits of having a blog.

The details below set out my setup for my blog account and my blogging statistics. When I set it up originally, I did look into the various options in terms of blogging providers and so on. I make no claim to my choices being optimal for me or other people. But I have found them more than adequate for my purposes. In particular, usage statistics (and comments) are a great form of feedback that is not necessarily available in other forms of academic communication. For further discussion of the benefits of blogging and related technologies in academic, Gideon Burton provides a great exposition.
1. Setting up the blog:
2. Blogging Statistics:
  • Website use statistics. I set up Google Analytics (see Andy Wibbels discussion). This gives me lots of great statistics about such things as the hit count for specific posts, number of visitors and page views over time, and country of the visitors. 
  • Feed use statistics. I set up a feed using Google Feed Burner at http://feeds.feedburner.com/jeromyanglim. This tells me: number of subscribers; number of readers reading a feed; number of readers clicking on a feed. (see, link 1; link 2).
  • Statistics on blog status in blogosphere: I set up an account on Technorati. It provides information about who is linking to my blog and additional indexes of the success.
3. Customisations:
4. Improving the blog: