Since launching the site I've become hooked on Google Analytics and check it daily to see how the site is doing. It's like a little competition with myself, did I get more visitors yesterday than the day before, do I have someone from a new country? Partly I'm trying to work out if my (very slow and rather laid back) promotion is working but mostly I just find it fascinating. You can see which site people came from, which countries people are from, which pages they looked at and how long they stayed - it's absolute heaven for a nosy person!

For instance, who is the single visitor from Hong Kong? Or how about the person in Portugal who's visited three times? I don't think I know anyone in either of those places, so how did they find me? See, it just sets the brain wondering. (If you happen to be either of these people, please do leave me a comment because I'm dying to know!)

In less than a month I've had 139 visitors from 12 different countries, many of whom have been back more than once. Of course, I'd love loads more but I think that's pretty good for a brand new site. So a big thank you to everyone who's visited and those of you who've been kind enough to mention me in your own blogs, I really do appreciate it.

I've also learnt so much about blogging since launching, which is a little bit odd since I've been blogging on Livejournal since 2003. However, Livejournal is such a self-contained world that blogging outside it is quite different. I have to think about things like 'how many visitors am I getting' and 'are the settings working, can search engines find me'? I never had to think about any of this stuff on Livejournal: my LJ is more of a personal space and I never really conceived of it as being about promoting myself as an artist, so numbers weren't important to me there. In fact, I still have no idea how many people read my LJ, nor do I particularly care because it's just not about that.

I'm currently mystified by the fact that Google found this site within days and I quickly got to number two in their listings*, yet The Diary Project site, which has been running over at Blogger since January doesn't comes up until page 16 despite the fact that my name is in the profile. Last night I spent about an hour researching how to get better search engine visibility: I changed various settings and added my name to the blog title. I've just checked and in less than a day it's gone up to page 3 - boy, those Google spiders work fast.

Oh, and I've changed the comments on here too, so you no longer need to have your first comment moderated. We'll see how that goes - if I'm drowned in spam then I may need to change it back but I thought the moderation thing might be off-putting.

*I'm knocked off the number one spot by another Kirsty Hall on Bebo, which is undoubtedly good for my ego!