I don’t have as many, but then I haven’t been accumulating them as long. Every now and then I go in and delete the posts I know I’m just never going to get around to finishing, and the ones that are too old to be interesting. And yet some of mine are at least nine months old.

I don’t usually participate in gimmickery like this, but I’m going to just because I can. I’m not going to do this all day, but just for a few hours, maybe between now, lunchtime, and when I get home after work. If this site looks like it always did then you missed it!

How strange. How very strange.

I got a copy of the database backup from the sysadmins, and I’ve reconstructed a new database. I lost of couple of the entries I posted over the weekend, but I hope to recover those from Google’s caches.

Computers have not been kind to me the past few days. It never rains, but it pours.

Update: Only two posts were lost, for Saturday and Sunday of the past weekend. I couldn’t find copies of either in Google’s cache, but I don’t think it is any great loss.

Signing up is easy. You give them a few data points about your weblog, such as its name, its URL, and what kind of weblog it is (WordPress, Movable Type, etc.), and you create a usename and password. Standard fare for this kind of site.

Instrumenting your weblog is a bit more difficult. For WordPress, it requires that you edit your theme’s footer, post, and comment templates and insert a snippet of javascript. The footer script is easy, but the scripts that go into the post and comment templates require a bit of hunting around to find just the right place. Instrumenting for Google Analytics required the insertion of only one bit of script, and it could go just about anywhere. However, Analytics is only tracking page views, whereas Measure Map also tracks things like post and comment creation. The additional bits of script enable them to gather more fine-grained data about the use of your site.

Measure Map has a tool at the top of some of the pages that lets you focus in on which part of your history you want to examine, like the Organizr in Flickr. However, like Organizr, it requires Flash. I hate Flash and would much rather see Measure Map use AJAX. Not too long ago, Flickr junked much of its Flash in favor of AJAX, and the site works better than ever. I’d like to see Measure Map do the same.

Measure Map doesn’t know about a post until someone visits it. After visiting three posts, Measure Map told me I had a total of three posts. So I brought up the archives and dutifully clicked through each post so that Measure Map could learn about them. It turns out I have 268 posts (not counting this one). Likewise, Measure Map doesn’t seem to know about comments until someone creates one.

When I looked at the Posts List in Measure Map, I found it had sorted the posts by number of visits, smallest to largest. Not very helpful. I have many posts with a small number of visits and only a few with an interesting number of visits. It’s easy enough to reverse the sort order, but shouldn’t the list default to the sort order that the most people are going to find helpful?

The Post List page only shows 20 per page. Why can’t it show me all of them, or at least give me the option of upping the number of posts per page to a larger number, like 100? I hate sites that show me my data in small sips; I have a broadband connection – I want to gulp!

There is, of course, some strangeness to the statistics that get generated when you’ve only been collecting data for a few minutes. For example, it told me something like “You’ve had 270 visits today, that’s 4100 percent lower than an average day.” I guess that when I was clicking through all those posts, I really skewed their idea of my visit rate. These oddities will even out over time. In fact, some of them already have; the page quoting the 4100% statistic now tells me my visitors today is the same as an average day.

Most frustrating thing about Measure Map: it has RSS feeds that can provide you daily statistics, but the feeds are located in a password-protected section of the web site. This means that web-based readers like Bloglines can’t see the feeds. BOO! HISS! There are better ways to do this!

Update: I’m not the only one to get his invitation today.

Update 2: I rooted around in the support forum at Measure Map and found a link to a page that describes how to embed your username and password in the feed so it should work with Bloglines. Haven’t tried it yet, but it’s the same kind of scheme that Google Mail uses, and I expect it will work.

Update 3: Here’s another guy who got an alpha-test invitation today.

@media print
{
#sidebar { display: none; }
}

The “@media print” qualifier specifies that the enclosed style applies only when printing. The “display: none” turns off display of the element named #sidebar. It’s that simple.