In reaction to a cryptic Blogger “bX” error, I changed the template for this blog. I’m not going to go into great detail about the error here, because a ton of posts have appeared on this subject – here is one well-written one.

At precisely the same time, my web traffic “flat-lined”.

A little background. First, if you haven’t already dived into the habit-forming Google Analytics for tracking your traffic, you should. Knowing that your blog is reaching eyeballs is reassuring. Your hard work and efforts are worthwhile. It’s how I start my day, everyday.

Be advised that a change in templates requires that you repeat the copy-paste of your tracking code.

Wonder where you readers fled to because your blog traffic graph “flat-lined” after a template change? Nowhere. You still have the average number of readers (reciprocal link traffic spikes notwithstanding) that you’ve always had, but the javascript code that you copied into your old template was likely removed by the application of the new template.

You won’t lose the historical data before the change, but by the time you notice, there might be an outage of traffic reporting (ten days in my case).

I got a clue something was afoot when I was getting traffic on my podcast, from a link on the blog – but no traffic on the blog itself.

While tracking your blog is relatively easy for those experienced with looking at HTML markup, it certainly isn’t for the casual non-technical blogger. A search of Google Help will always bring up instances of the same problem, but as both are Google products, better documentation is called for.

Whatever happened to a separation of the presentation from the data?