Subscribing via FeedBurner and Other Meta Goodness

I set it up so you can subscribe to our blog through FeedBurner. My main reason for the change was to give people a bunch more subscription options and to give me a better way of tracking blog traffic. I’ve been using Google Analytics, which is good for what it does. The old feed address should (hopefully) still work, and if you don’t feel like making the change, no worries at all. I also set it up to work through Technorati, but I haven’t the foggiest idea how to use that yet.

“Does that mean you’re spying on me?!?!”

While it may fill my ego to know we have a growing number of readers, I’m mostly interested in what posts people in general are reading and what search engine terms are used to get here. This helps us get a feel for what people want to know more about.

(BTW - Nothing we see personally identifies you in any way except for whatever you decide to post in a comment. We intentionally set this up so people could be as anonymous as they wanted to be.)

On top of autism-related search terms, we’ve had a lot of hits on speech issues, fish oil, apraxia, and other things related to late talking or non-verbal children. The picture board/PECS discussion was a hit based on visits and searches. Sensory issues are also popular search terms.

Knowing these sorts of things will help us anticipate the kinds of information you’re looking for, and we’ll try to plan future posts accordingly. That won’t stop us from blogging about whatever the heck we feel like blogging about a good chunk of the time, but we are a community of parents who just want to learn how best to help our children. If we can help keep the conversation going, we’ve fulfilled one of our biggest goals.

What I find particularly poignant are the numbers of searches that lead people to us that clearly involve parents just trying to figure out what the hell is going on with their children. I read the aggregated list from Google - which includes words like “flapping arms” and “doesn’t respond to name” - and think, “there are a lot of scared, confused, stressed-out parents out there, and I’m one of them.”

We’ve already (electronically) met some of our readers and those conversations have meant a lot to us. We invite you to say hi and let us know if you have questions. We can be a little slow to respond depending on how crazy things are at The Flashlight House, so we’ll apologize in advance for that.

Again, thanks for reading. Y’all are great!