I confess, I am a statistics junkie and I know that many of my readers are too!! We want to know what is going on behind the scenes of our blogs down to the minute. We are nosy. We want to know what are readers are interested in. We want to know where they are coming from. And there is nothing more exhilarating for a stats junkie than to watch a wave of traffic sparked by a Stumble, a great Digg or a link from a high profile site happen REAL TIME! Yes, real time.In my webmaster toolbox, I keep a handful of stats packages - basically, because they all serve a different purpose. I like the big picture traffic information I get from Awstats that comes with my web hosting package. Google Analytics gives me pretty detailed stats, too, and its free.

However, Performancing Metrics (pMetrics) does it all - and it does it all REAL TIME. pMetrics makes it so easy to capture a great amount of information about your site’s visitors quickly and in logical groups.

Let’s take a look at what pMetrics has to offer!

The Dashboard

When you log into your pMetrics dashboard you can quickly get a sense of the traffic, visitor actions, and what is popular at a glance. pMetrics uses tabbed navigation so you can get to different types of data quickly. Data is also presented numerically, using a bar graph, and by percentage increase or decrease from the previous time period. You can grab your data by day, week, month and more through a simple drop down.

Detail Pages

The visitors detail page shows the time, IP address, country, operating system, browser, number of actions the user took, how long they were there, where they came from, and what search term they used for each and every visitor to the site. You can get aggregate information by country, city, language, browser, operating system and screen resolution as well.

Action information is available by page views, searches, incoming links, outbound links and downloads. You can get detailed information at every turn.

Get content details displayed in multiple formats. If you prefer to see aggregate data as a bar graph, its available. Prefer a cloud display? You can get that, too. You can even export data to Excel for more analysis.

Using the pMetrics Spy tab, you can watch visitors interact with your site as it happens.

Stay informed without logging in! You can subscribe to feeds of your traffic summary, visitors, searches, and incoming links.

Save yourself a step. You can even monitor your feed statistics, subscribers, item views and click throughs directly from your pMetrics dashboard.

Get the most information on your visitors! Another cool feature is that readers who have left comments on your blog no longer show up as IP addresses, they show up as the name they use when leaving a comment.

Conclusion

pMetrics has it all. You can get more information on your site traffic, visitors and source from pMetrics than you can from any other stats package. The pMetrics developers have managed to deliver all of that information in a logical, easy to read, and meaningful way.

pMetrics is a must have for bloggers, but even more so if you manage more than one blog. You can access all of your sites from one main page. With the basic free version of pMetrics you can monitor up to 3 sites at once. If you are like me and manage more, I recommend upgrading to the Pro version for $2.99 per month. With Pro you can monitor up to 10 sites at a time and you get access to all of the pMetrics features. When you register, you get 21 days of Pro for FREE anyhow, so give it a whirl!

If you use pMetrics or decide to try it, let me know what you think!

Did I ever mention that I am married to Mr. Technology? Well, I am. He just can’t help himself. If there is a new gadget, tool, or tech toy out there, Mr. T. will have to pick it up, play with it, test it, or more often than not, buy it.

After experiencing one too many blue screens of death in the early days of our home offices, Mr. T. has become enamored with external data storage. From a bottomless supply of floppy disks back in the 90’s to stacks of writable CDs, Zip drives, flash drives, and external hard drives, we have tried them all. I’m not kidding.

Anyhow, Mr. T. was at his favorite haunt the other day and decided that my life could be made easier with a new technology tool or two. He picked up a SmartDisk USB FireLite drive for me. Why? Because. Because the FireLite drive is so cool. It can hold 160GB of data - which is more than the hard drive in my 3 year old Dell desktop PC. And get this! The entire unit is slightly larger than a deck of cards, which means it will fit in my laptop bag or even in my purse if I need it to.

It is also plug and play! It requires no additional power source (but can handle an AC power supply if needed) and even though it came with software, I haven’t had to install it.

No more excuses when it comes to backing up your data. It just doesn’t get any easier than this!

It’s not an iPhone or some other fancy new gadget. As a matter of fact, they’ve been around for a while, but still, I am so happy to finally get my own iPod! I was tired of listening to Hannah Montana on my daughter’s iPod and classic rock on my husband’s iPod was just not my style. Plus I wanted one small enough to put in an arm band so I can easily wear it while walking the dog or riding the recumbent bike.

So, Friday the 13th was my lucky day, because my well-trained kids had been passing on the message for months to my husband and they all got me a hot pink iPod nano for my birthday.

After dinner I immediately headed to the CD cabinet and grabbed some of my favorite oldies (Alphaville, Depeche Mode, Elvis Presley, The Replacements) and began ripping them onto my iPod. Once I made it through the stack I headed over to iTunes to grab some new tunes from The Kaiser Chiefs, Mika, Robbie Williams and Fatboy Slim to round out my very eclectic collection.

Now it’s your turn. What are the best sites for staying up to date on the best tips and such for iPods?