No new is good news
No news is good news, or, as the English King James I wrote in 1616 'No newis is bettir than evill newis.' Anyway, I'm doing fine thanks! I hope the same holds true for Murlu (murlu.com). I was following his blog already for a while, for reasons I blogged about before. After leaving his job, cranking up the posting speed, and then leaving for Japan, all went silent: his main blog since march, his traveling blog since april. His Twitter feed continues, but all tweets since April appear automated. That's odd isn't it? And Spooky.
Referral spam killed the fun
What is odd as well, is referral spam. I blogged about it before, mainly focusing on one player that went pretty far and made things worth diving into. Then at some point my Blogger statistics went crazy with tons of weird sites. Here's my all-time top list of referrers:
getrxpills.com
edprescriptiondrugs.com
antibiotics-shop.com
basicpills.com
god-sersy.livejournal.com
9pillsonline.com
condition.dn.ua
deluxetravelua.com
amoxil-pharm.com
e-pharmacy-online.com
I don't recommend visiting any of those. It sure killed the fun of tracking Blogger's statistics. Google's Analytics however is not disturbed by all this (funny fact: they're both owned by the same company). So I've slowly switched to tracking that and webmaster tools, and reactions and follower counts both on Blogger and Feedburner. As long as Blogger doesn't do anything to defend against this, Blogger stats are plain useless, and a waste of programmer's time!
Back in town
Basically, Google Analytics showed an increase in visitors over time, even without new posts arriving. This encouraged me to return to the front line. Both my own activities and things happening in the outside world give rise to lots of stuff to talk about. A lot of my time recently went into the development of a Facebook application. Developing an app for Facebook, and learning more about this humongous beast of a website along the way, was surely an interesting process. Now there's the question: will it blend? Will our ideas, our technical implementations and - most important of all - our user's interests and demands mix into something sustainable? More about that later!
Post Scriptum
In other news, my first offspring blog wasn't really going anywhere. And my priorities have been such that a second one has not aired (yet). My company's doing fine although the Facebook activities are actually out of it's scope and hopefully will result in another one launched soon.
Posts tonen met het label Website Statistics. Alle posts tonen
Posts tonen met het label Website Statistics. Alle posts tonen
Google's Webmaster Tools (vid)
Google posted a video on Youtube giving some tips about using Webmaster Tools for SEO. Frankly this tool doesn't become too exciting until you are already getting a bunch of (search) traffic and/or inbound links, but it is still a really nice tool. I blogged about it a little bit before, but this video does a much better job discussing the ins and outs of the tool (wonder why that may be...;)
A website's importance
White Collars
In daily life, we value information partially based on the 'authority' of the messenger. In other words: if something is brought by Reuters Press, we value it more than when we hear it from a 15 year old who doesn't even know how to spell correctly. If your doctor tells you to do this or that, you are more prone to listen then when the old lady at the supermarket does so. Although there's cases when this strategy doesn't work out too well, it is normally quite an effective strategy. With so much information coming at us, we simply have to use these rules-of-thumb.
Websites
In the world wide web, these notions of 'authority' are important as well, in many ways. Some users may have the tendency to easily believe whatever is written on the web (which can be a problem all by itself!), others may be more critical, taking into account the source into account when evaluating the relevance of information. Search indexers help out here a lot by trying to sort information based on the 'authority' of the source. Webmasters try and make use of this of course, but that's not what this post is about.
Estimate it yourself
This post is about wanting to get a quick estimate of a site's reputation for yourself, when your existing knowledge leaves you clueless. This can be for various reasons. Perhaps you found information and want to know how trustworthy it is. Perhaps you want to know which sites could be most effective to partner with, to buy ads on, etcetera.
The site itself
A site itself can give a good first impression. Is it a blog? How lang has it been around? How long since the last post or your post of interest was submitted? Other clues you may get from the number of followers, the number of comments, the type of comments and maybe even the site's layout (be careful!).
Google PageRank
Google's PageRank is an indication of a page's importance, valued by its connectedness based on links to that page from elsewhere, especially from pages with high PageRanks themselves. This helps (it is not the only factor!) Google to sort search results, but by itself it can be informative as well! An individual rank is calculated for each page. This can be useful if you want data from a single page. If your interest concerns a whole site, you could lookup the PageRank for the site's homepage, but this ignores all links from outside that link to a any other page within the site.
Alexa Rating
The Alexa rating is based on a lot of user's actual browsing data, collected by a toolbar. Probably, the users that have the toolbar are not a perfect representation of the whole population of internet users. This may influence the results a little. Alexa Rankings are three months averages, so they change only gradually. In contrast to Google's PageRank, the Alexa rating is based on entire sites. Alexa also provides other statistics than rankings, by the way. Top 3 Alexa rankings: Google, Facenbook, YouTube. My blog: above 23.000.000. This guy's website: less than 2.000.
How to get it?
How to get the PageRank for a website? You could use Google's Toolbar, or if you're using Chrome browser (ironically) use PageRank Status from chromefans.org. The latter also gives you Alexa ratings. These are in any case accessible via alexa.com.
In daily life, we value information partially based on the 'authority' of the messenger. In other words: if something is brought by Reuters Press, we value it more than when we hear it from a 15 year old who doesn't even know how to spell correctly. If your doctor tells you to do this or that, you are more prone to listen then when the old lady at the supermarket does so. Although there's cases when this strategy doesn't work out too well, it is normally quite an effective strategy. With so much information coming at us, we simply have to use these rules-of-thumb.
Websites
In the world wide web, these notions of 'authority' are important as well, in many ways. Some users may have the tendency to easily believe whatever is written on the web (which can be a problem all by itself!), others may be more critical, taking into account the source into account when evaluating the relevance of information. Search indexers help out here a lot by trying to sort information based on the 'authority' of the source. Webmasters try and make use of this of course, but that's not what this post is about.
Estimate it yourself
This post is about wanting to get a quick estimate of a site's reputation for yourself, when your existing knowledge leaves you clueless. This can be for various reasons. Perhaps you found information and want to know how trustworthy it is. Perhaps you want to know which sites could be most effective to partner with, to buy ads on, etcetera.
The site itself
A site itself can give a good first impression. Is it a blog? How lang has it been around? How long since the last post or your post of interest was submitted? Other clues you may get from the number of followers, the number of comments, the type of comments and maybe even the site's layout (be careful!).
Google PageRank
Google's PageRank is an indication of a page's importance, valued by its connectedness based on links to that page from elsewhere, especially from pages with high PageRanks themselves. This helps (it is not the only factor!) Google to sort search results, but by itself it can be informative as well! An individual rank is calculated for each page. This can be useful if you want data from a single page. If your interest concerns a whole site, you could lookup the PageRank for the site's homepage, but this ignores all links from outside that link to a any other page within the site.
Alexa Rating
The Alexa rating is based on a lot of user's actual browsing data, collected by a toolbar. Probably, the users that have the toolbar are not a perfect representation of the whole population of internet users. This may influence the results a little. Alexa Rankings are three months averages, so they change only gradually. In contrast to Google's PageRank, the Alexa rating is based on entire sites. Alexa also provides other statistics than rankings, by the way. Top 3 Alexa rankings: Google, Facenbook, YouTube. My blog: above 23.000.000. This guy's website: less than 2.000.
How to get it?
How to get the PageRank for a website? You could use Google's Toolbar, or if you're using Chrome browser (ironically) use PageRank Status from chromefans.org. The latter also gives you Alexa ratings. These are in any case accessible via alexa.com.
Metagain
Meta...again
I thought it was time for another meta blog post. There's only a few days left of December and with this post I am back on track for the one post per day goal. I admit some posts were shallower than others, but all together I do think it is a nice display of my current capabilities as a Blogger (leaving open whether these capabilities are any good). Let's look at how the Blog is doing.
Visitors
Woot, my site gets visitors! The transition from a total flatliner to getting-some-hits is very cool. I also have to admit that some promotional tweaking does help, at least in this phase. A few backlinks in other blogs (mostly comments I made myself I have to admit) and a niche subject that started to generate some hits did help a lot. Last two weeks I'm at +/- 15 visitors a day (multiple page hits per visit though), 20% are returning visitors: thanks! Really! Thank you! :-D
Tools / statistics
I have three tools I commonly use: Google Statistics, Blogger Statistics and Google Webmaster Tools. They all have their pros and cons. Blogger's statistics are real time, the other two are lag 1 or 2 days behind. I only recently discovered the cool things that Google's Webmaster Tools offers. Some features only become interesting when there's enough data available. One that works (for me) nicely at the moment involves Google's searches.
Pingywebedition
Apparently Google keeps track of every search, including the pages that were returned, their position, and which hits are actually clicked on. The only search query I see info for is pingywebedition. Although the amount of searches per day are around 50 (very low!), I have a CTR (Click Trough Rate, the percentage of times that my page is actually clicked when it is displayed) of 20% (this has been rising the last few weeks). This gives my roughly 10 visitors a day (each hitting perhaps a number of pages). Although these numbers are soooo low and insignificant in any way, it nicely shows how 'being big in a niche' can be better than 'being small in huge topic'.
New hits
Today I noticed I'm also being found once in a while now in searches for the Harmony Remote 650. Maybe this is coincidence, maybe some other factors play a role here that I do not fully understand (yet)! Don't tell, but I tried to push that a little more today by posting my review at a few other (relevant) blogposts. It is micromanagement, I know, and it is only worth the effort because of the learning experience. And the rush of rising graph's :-D
Next?
What's next? I had another idea today: start a new blog each month, niches this time, stopping what doesn't work or isn't fun to do, and use this blog as a meta blog about the whole process. That way, this blog would also get some focus (and less-than-a-blogpost-a-day). Haha, this is so me, not wanting to choose, even when I have to pick a niche, I think about picking 12 :-D Will let you know how this evolves!
I thought it was time for another meta blog post. There's only a few days left of December and with this post I am back on track for the one post per day goal. I admit some posts were shallower than others, but all together I do think it is a nice display of my current capabilities as a Blogger (leaving open whether these capabilities are any good). Let's look at how the Blog is doing.
Visitors
Woot, my site gets visitors! The transition from a total flatliner to getting-some-hits is very cool. I also have to admit that some promotional tweaking does help, at least in this phase. A few backlinks in other blogs (mostly comments I made myself I have to admit) and a niche subject that started to generate some hits did help a lot. Last two weeks I'm at +/- 15 visitors a day (multiple page hits per visit though), 20% are returning visitors: thanks! Really! Thank you! :-D
Tools / statistics
I have three tools I commonly use: Google Statistics, Blogger Statistics and Google Webmaster Tools. They all have their pros and cons. Blogger's statistics are real time, the other two are lag 1 or 2 days behind. I only recently discovered the cool things that Google's Webmaster Tools offers. Some features only become interesting when there's enough data available. One that works (for me) nicely at the moment involves Google's searches.
Pingywebedition
Apparently Google keeps track of every search, including the pages that were returned, their position, and which hits are actually clicked on. The only search query I see info for is pingywebedition. Although the amount of searches per day are around 50 (very low!), I have a CTR (Click Trough Rate, the percentage of times that my page is actually clicked when it is displayed) of 20% (this has been rising the last few weeks). This gives my roughly 10 visitors a day (each hitting perhaps a number of pages). Although these numbers are soooo low and insignificant in any way, it nicely shows how 'being big in a niche' can be better than 'being small in huge topic'.
New hits
Today I noticed I'm also being found once in a while now in searches for the Harmony Remote 650. Maybe this is coincidence, maybe some other factors play a role here that I do not fully understand (yet)! Don't tell, but I tried to push that a little more today by posting my review at a few other (relevant) blogposts. It is micromanagement, I know, and it is only worth the effort because of the learning experience. And the rush of rising graph's :-D
Next?
What's next? I had another idea today: start a new blog each month, niches this time, stopping what doesn't work or isn't fun to do, and use this blog as a meta blog about the whole process. That way, this blog would also get some focus (and less-than-a-blogpost-a-day). Haha, this is so me, not wanting to choose, even when I have to pick a niche, I think about picking 12 :-D Will let you know how this evolves!
Googlify your life
Although Google is still mainly known as THE search engine of the web, it offers tons of other services as well. For free. Some of them are quite known as well, such as Gmail and Google Calander, although not all of them are a heavily associated to Google and are brands on their own, such as YouTube and Blogger.
Here's the things that Google does for me, besides serving search results, ads and YouTube videos:
Gmail + Gmail Calander + Contacts + Syncing
Recently I found myself switching a lot between my home desktop computer, my laptop and my computer at work, and on each, between Windows and Ubuntu. You know you're doing something wrong if you have to reboot into windows to access this or that email, or when you brought your laptop for holiday but have to copy your friend's email addresses from your phone's address list.
So I switched to Gmail. This is the first time in my life I'm changing my email address, and I'm taking at least a year for the transition. I have a symbian phone (Nokia E71) and although it's crappy compared to the iPhones and Androids on Steroids it does support Google's sync. This allowed me to transfer my contacts and calander to Google and keep them synchronized from now on.
I set up POP-import so Gmail checks my old email account for me and places these mails in a seperate folder, to ease the transition. Next I transfered 13k mails from Outlook to Gmail. I did it the easy way:
1. Set up IMAP access in Google
2. Connect to the IMAP account from Outlook
3. Drag your email folders from local to Gmail (you might have to play a little bit first with folder names and labeling depening on your demands)
4. Wait (> overnight in my case :-D)
So now I have my all my contacts, all my email and all my calander items on every computer that has internet access. And I can search them...fast! Without having to hear the heart-breaking sounds of my harddisk crunching away when indexes are being rebuilt.
If you want to link your own URL to your AppEngine application, you can not go around Google Apps. That's how I use it at the moment, but it won't be long before I will be reading email sent to name@mycompany.nl via Gmail.
There's a lot more that Google offers, but at the moment I don't need it.
Maybe later.
Here's the things that Google does for me, besides serving search results, ads and YouTube videos:
Gmail + Gmail Calander + Contacts + Syncing
Recently I found myself switching a lot between my home desktop computer, my laptop and my computer at work, and on each, between Windows and Ubuntu. You know you're doing something wrong if you have to reboot into windows to access this or that email, or when you brought your laptop for holiday but have to copy your friend's email addresses from your phone's address list.So I switched to Gmail. This is the first time in my life I'm changing my email address, and I'm taking at least a year for the transition. I have a symbian phone (Nokia E71) and although it's crappy compared to the iPhones and Androids on Steroids it does support Google's sync. This allowed me to transfer my contacts and calander to Google and keep them synchronized from now on.
I set up POP-import so Gmail checks my old email account for me and places these mails in a seperate folder, to ease the transition. Next I transfered 13k mails from Outlook to Gmail. I did it the easy way:
1. Set up IMAP access in Google
2. Connect to the IMAP account from Outlook
3. Drag your email folders from local to Gmail (you might have to play a little bit first with folder names and labeling depening on your demands)
4. Wait (> overnight in my case :-D)
So now I have my all my contacts, all my email and all my calander items on every computer that has internet access. And I can search them...fast! Without having to hear the heart-breaking sounds of my harddisk crunching away when indexes are being rebuilt.
Google Docs
It's not Office, it's not even OpenOffice. But as long as you have internet, it's there. I have a few documents / spreadsheets that I have to access from different places, such as technical notes on a system that I have to read and change on location. For this purpose, Google Docs has proven to be very useful to me.Blogger + Google Analytics
Having a Gmail account, setting up a blog at Blogger is quite easy. A well placed JavaScript script enables me to use Google Analytics to give me statistics. Google Analytics can do a lot more, by the way. It is a powerful tool for any webmaster.AppEngine
AppEngine is amazing. I have recently started to use it to built web applications. In Java (it also supports Python, which appears to actually be more popular). And they are fully scalable. I admit it hase quite a learning curve, partly because it doesn't use SQL but Google's Bigtable. But I think it's worth it, although I have to see how it holds when going live. It's free as long as you don't exceed your quota's. But unlike your regular php-mysql site hosted at randomcheaphost.com it can handle heavy traffic bursts very well (same holds true long term traffic increases by the way).Google Apps
I think the naming is confusing, Google AppEngine (appspot.com) vs Google Apps, but once you get the difference it's fine. Google Apps is Google-for-your-company (< 40 accounts is free, so personal use is deffinately an ooption). Google tools such as Docs and Gmail are accessed / addressed with name@yourdomain.com and different tools can be added (or blocked). You can also link an exsiting URL to Google Apps, although you have to change DNS records for that.If you want to link your own URL to your AppEngine application, you can not go around Google Apps. That's how I use it at the moment, but it won't be long before I will be reading email sent to name@mycompany.nl via Gmail.
There's a lot more that Google offers, but at the moment I don't need it.
Maybe later.
Blogger analytics
So apparently Blogger doesn't give you page view counts or other statistics. However, I would really like to know when I make my first steps out of anonymity. In comes Google analytics. Of course, I tried to figure it out all by myself, creating an account, adding the JavaScript snippet to the HTML and waiting for a day to see if Google Analytics kicked in.
It didn't... So now what? Trying something else and waiting again for 24 hours? No thanks. So I reverted to Firebug's http (net) sniffer: no request to the analytics site was made at all! After some debugging, I discovered my mistakes:
And now we wait...
It didn't... So now what? Trying something else and waiting again for 24 hours? No thanks. So I reverted to Firebug's http (net) sniffer: no request to the analytics site was made at all! After some debugging, I discovered my mistakes:
- I tried to put the JavaScript in de <HEAD> tag of the blog's template HTML. Instead, it had to go just before the </BODY> tag.
- Waiting for 24 hours to test is not necessary. In the edit section of your website profile, there's a 'check status' link in the upper right.
- Maybe I should have just spent 2 minutes on finding a good tutorial, because they are out there.
And now we wait...
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