Basically "Footprints" is a Xangaesque way of saying "hits". They're a record of various kinds of access to your site. First, you have your regular old visits, logged as being from a particular username if the visitor has a Xanga account and is logged in at the time, or by the country/state of the visitor's IP address if not. Ones from google, yahoo, etc. are search engine robots indexing the content of your site so it shows up in relevant search queries. Finally, RSS footprints are hits to your site's RSS feed, which is essentially another subscription option in addition to e-mail, that notifies interested users when you make a new post. RSS is actually how I keep track of most people's posting (except those with Xanga lock turned on). Whenever you write something, like today, a program I have running on one of my computers will notice it within 15 minutes, and then send me a message on IRC (kind of like instant messenger) saying "Tara made a new post entitled "blah blah something or other", and here's a link to it: ". If I happen to be online at the time, I know right away, and if not, I'll see that message as soon as I come home and look at my computer.

So in short, footprints are just people (or bots) accessing your blog to see what you have to say, and letting you know who (or where from) the visitors were.

And that is why I waited to respond to your post -- because I had no hope of answering that coherently.  Not that I have much hope of doing anything coherently at 2:30 in the morning, so I'm going to bed... but first I wanted to say that of course I still read your posts, and of course I still care about you and miss you.  Silence doesn't mean you're absent from my thoughts, amiga, or anyone else's, I'd wager.  We're just not that good at making time for what really counts.

I hope you feel better soon, Tara.  I'm sick too, and it's almost finals, and that's no fun.