I will be short and sweet here. Even writing this post took a very short while. In fact as you go along with Feedjit for your blog you will find it hardly takes any time or effort at all and how amazingly easy it is. To cut a long story short I was using Firestats to monitor the hits to my website and also as a bonus Firestats came with a sidebar widget that showed the most popular posts on the blog. I upgraded Firestats to the latest RC version and things immediately went kaput and the solutions offered sounded so time consuming that I felt it would be easier to search for a different plugin altogether. Now as anyone who has wanted to put popular posts on their sidebar will know this is probably the most difficult ask of them all and there hardly exist any decent plugins that will display popular posts in the sidebar. It is much easier to get recent posts and similar posts in your sidebar, but try getting a sticky for specific posts or a popular posts sidebar plugin and you will know what I talking about!
Thus began my search and I have since found an excellent plugin by Lester Chan WP-PostViews 1.30. I will write about this plugin hopefully very soon so keep yourself posted on the happenings here. Moving along further I was reading a friend’s blog when I saw he had Feedjit displayed on his blog and thus I was introduced to Feedjit. Feedjit provides widgets that provide live feeds on Live Traffic Feed, Live Traffic Map, Live Recommended Reading, and Live Page Popularity. The best part is you can get the code for all of them from the homepage of Feedjit and it does not require any registration or any details, not even the URL of your blog. All you have to do is collect the code and put it on your blog where you want the feeds displayed. I have put mine on the sidebar since it’s difficult to insert javascript in the middle of a post in WordPress to serve as an example of what Feedjit does.
The cons, well customization is very limited, in fact there is very little you can do to make changes. The most I could do was change the color of the text, links, background, etc. to reflect my blog’s current theme. Apart from that there is nothing much else on offer in terms of customization. Also, Feedjit will not win any awards in the looks department, being very threadbare and having plain Jane kind of looks and this might in fact turn people off from putting it up on their blogs. But if looks don’t matter and functionality is what you are after then Feedjit hits it right on target and you will be amazed at the simplicity and functionality of Feedjit.
A quick look at the feeds available. First off is Live Traffic Feed which will display incoming traffic to your blog and on display are the location like City and State, the link that redirected them to your blog, and the link they landed on your blog. There is also a link to watch stats in real time that will redirect to the Feedjit website. Second is Live Traffic Map which will display a map of the recent visitors with red hotspots identifying the high traffic areas. Clicking on the map will redirect to the Feedjit page with breakdown of the country maps with information sourced from Google Maps. Third is Live Recommended Reading, which displays other pages and links visited on your blog by recent visitors. Fourth and finally is Live Page Popularity, which displays the most popular pages for the day. Of course since Feedjit works on real time feeds it means this is constantly updated and not reflective of a 24-hour period. The downside to this is it would not be reflective of pages that are all time favorites or so it seems, but I will need to further check this out.
Like I have stated I have put up these widgets in the sidebar, but I am not sure how long they will remain in the sidebar though. I am still in the process of sorting out what fits best and do realize that there a touch more widgets on the blog that need to be taken down probably. Still Feedjit has my vote for its sheer ease of use and installation and for the real time performance it delivers, which puts it leagues ahead of others especially considering you don’t need to register or provide any details at all, just collect the code and you are good to go makes Feedjit a clear winner. Try it out and see it for yourself since it does not take long or much to check it out being so simple and easy.
