In Which I Realize I Know NOTHING About the Internets

I am apparently no Al Gore.*

The other day I was reading one of the fantastic blogs I follow (www.suburbanmatron.com – Hi Becky!) where the blogger (that’s the right lingo, yeah?) said something along the lines of knowing who reads her blog and how people arrived at her site. Uh, what? I want to be able to do that! So I set out to accomplish this very thing.

And then I realized I have no clue what I’m doing.

First of all, there’s some sort of Google Tool where you load your blog and then it gives you all these statistics. Um, what’s “google”? (Just kidding, I know that!) But really, you have to verify it by loading some sort of meta thing or html thing. Talk about a four-letter word I don’t use! What the heck are those things? And when I clicked on the directions, I found them equally confusing- I really, really obviously do NOT speak tech language. (Maybe I should stop applying to all those Webmaster jobs? Hmmm.) All I know is I type a little ditty, hit “post” and up it pops to hydeparkheroes. That’s IT. I know nothing else. Oh wait, I also know how to load a picture. See, there’s a picture.

I probably screwed that up somehow, too.

Well THEN I realized that I don’t have to do that meta/html thing, because I’m on the Blogger host site (again, no idea if these terms are correct), which apparently has some big deal with Google where all you have to do is click a button and they will give you crawl something or other and other data with graphs and stuff. Whatever. What I REALLY want to know is who reads my blog. Because let’s be honest, we ALL follow blogs but never post anything on them because we are either insecure about what to say OR we can’t think of something witty and therefore will be judged by the other readers OR we don’t want anyone to actually have proof that we read that blog (Wonkette, anyone?) SO HOW DO I DO THIS? I found out that there are people who receive feeds of my blog, but I want to KNOW WHO YOU ARE!

So until I figure that out, I’m just going to assume that people actually ARE reading what I write-obviously- and that it makes them laugh (whether at me or with me, I’m not sure). And the reality is that even if there was a specific tool that listed out who reads our blog, where they’re from (Azerbaijan!) and what they’re doing at that very moment (get your finger out of your nose), I probably wouldn’t understand it anyways.

I am a tech-savvy person’s worst nightmare.

*He invented the internet, right?