One of my favourite tools in Google Analytics is the Map Overview, which shows where in the world people are visiting the site from. Of course, most of our visitors are local, but every month I notice visitors from random parts of the globe. And looking at the statistics for the last year (from July 2008 to the end of last month), we’ve had visitors from over a hundred countries.

Helloooo, Medicine Hat!

The map allows me to zoom in on countries and see which cities and towns people visit from, and the results are sometimes unexpected. Cities like London, Paris, Berlin send more people, but if I look at the number of pages visited, we seem to have avid fans in Pudsey, Dinan, Rostock. In America, California and New York send the most visitors, but it’s visitors from North Carolina, West Virginia and Mississippi that stay longest. It’s not just western countries: We’ve had visitors from places as far afield as Azerbaijan and Burundi, while Turkey and India are both in the top ten countries by visitor numbers. Our northernmost visitor was from Akureyri in Iceland, our southernmost from Invercargill in New Zealand. (Medicine Hat is in Canada: just 1 visitor, but I couldn’t resist the name.)

What Google Analytics doesn’t tell us, of course, is who our visitors are. When women visit the Library, whether they’re Glaswegians popping in from down the road, or Aberdonians on a day trip, or Italian students new to the city, or the women from China, Pakistan, Ethiopia and so many other countries who have made Glasgow their home and come to the Library to learn English, we can take the time to speak to them and learn their stories. But on the website, people come and go without us really making contact. Who is the person (we can’t even say whether they’re women or men) who visited three times from Libreville in Gabon? What’s behind the flurry of visits in the past month from Denver, Colorado? Who are the 18 women (or men) in Iran who visited the website over the past year?

You know us, I hope: Who are you?

It’s true that you learn something new every day – I think it’s just more obvious when you have something to show for it at the end. So, check out the new site and have a look at the news items and volunteer pages to see my handywork. Click here to get to the GWL site.

Happy Holidays everyone, have a fantastic time over the festive period and looking forward to a prosperous 2009 for all.

We’ve been a little lax with updating the blog recently, and hopefully with the new website (and the New Year) we’ll be posting more often. You’ll notice a few new additions to the blog: Our RSS Feed is now hosted by Feedburner back on this site at http://blog.womenslibrary.org.uk/feed/ (I’ll be announcing a number of RSS feed for the main website as well), and the GWL Kettle (indispensable to the smooth running of the Library) is now on Twitter.

The microblog on Twitter is one of a number of places you can find us online. You can visit the GWL Facebook page, and become a member of the Glasgow Women’s Library group to get regular updates.

We’ve also been bookmarking websites with Delicious. If you bookmark with Delicious and want to send us links to websites you think we might like, tag them with for:GlasgowWomensLibrary (or for:liblogger).

If you’re on any of these social networking sites, get in touch next time you’re logged in. And if you’re on any other social networking site where you think GWL should be joining in, please let us know!

This is just to line it up with a few changes we’ll (I’ll) be making to the main website over the summer.

Try increasing or decreasing the text size in your browser (View > Text size in Firefox) – it should change size smoothly.

One particular development is the addition of tags in addition to categories, which tie in to what I’ve been attempting to teach GWL staff about website taxonomies…

(Of course, the main reason I’m posting this is because I’m giddy from managing to upgrade the blog without all the old posts vanishing into the ether…)

I’ve also added a few different categories, before the number of ‘uncategorised’ posts got too scary to sort.

But it makes up for the fact that, if you’re folding 100 A5 leaflets out of A3 paper, you have 200 folds. That’ll learn me to over-design our paper work…