Tag Archives: Web

My life through Google

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  • A large part of my online income depends on Google Adsense.
  • I filter my email through gmail and since this morning I’m feeding a backup gmail account with a copy of every single email I get. Thanks Matt for that idea.
  • I use Google’s search engine to find solutions to my problems.
  • Like Tom and Matt I now read my feeds through Google Reader. Not being able to hit ‘S’ to go forward a feed still sucks but my workflow has changed to accommodate it.

It’s a bit scary how much I use we use Google.

PS. I’m testing a new WordPress plugin. It needs comments to work on, so please leave a comment! It’ll hopefully see the light of day tomorrow! :)

Oh Facebook! I feel so dirty!

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I finally joined. I’m always the last one in. I haven’t even got a myspace or a bebo account, but that’s probably a good thing. Apparently Facebook is a popular site. Bah! Where’s my Orkut login?

Anyway, thanks Nicole for the invite!

I’ve been really adventurous today. I also took a peek at Tumblr and set up an account to track Holy Shmoly!, In Photos, del.icio.us, donncha.stumbleupon.com (not sure if that’s working), and it might finally make me use Twitter again as my Twitter account is added too, with friends. (Which leads me to another problem, do I have permission to post twitters from other people there?)

Blame Damien for blogging about it in the first place.

Stumble upon WordPress.com

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Nice! I just noticed that Stumbleupon support WordPress.com by adding the WordPress.com favicon to the SU taskbar.

stumbleupon-wpcom.png

Of course, it’s not the only way to browse WordPress.com, you can always use the Next link to jump to a random blog. The beauty of Stumbleupon, is that someone recommended the link. I’ve found some interesting blogs including the Doorways Around the World blog which is errr, full of photos of doorways.

Here’s my stumbleupon page. You’ll notice I’ve stumbled some of my own posts. I don’t want to spam my account and stumble everything, but if I’ve spent longer than usual writing some posts, it’s a good way of driving a few extra visitors to those special posts. Stumbleupon is definitely my favourite social bookmarking site. Install the plugin and start stumbling!

PS. I’m not the only one who likes Stumbleupon!

Porn on your iPhone

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Acting on what Matt blogged, I searched my logs for “iPhone” and found a few interesting entries. Looks like iPhone users are using the Internet for what everyone else uses it for. Searching for nice boobs:

xx.xxx.xx.xxx – - [08/Jul/2007:03:49:05 +0000] “GET /tag/nice-boobs/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 7786 “http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=nice+boobs&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8″ “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CP
U like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3″

I wonder how well that small screen will display them?

Dofollowing links in comments and trackbacks

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I’ve just installed the Do Follow Trackback and Do Follow Comments plugins so now the links in your comments and trackbacks will be stalked followed by Google and any other search engine or service that know about the rel='nofollow' link attribute.

It’s not a completely free lunch though. Any spam comments will be deleted, legitimate comments with spammy urls will have their URLs mangled. Check out this comment and this one. Those _ characters in the urls make them pretty useless.

There are 7,457 comments on over 4,500 posts here. That’s a lot of URLs to get some PR loving.

The change is active here on Holy Shmoly! and In Photos dot org.

Google just killed the ad click tracking industry

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It would appear that Google stopped displaying the “Go to ….” message in the status bar when someone clicked on Adsense adverts.

What’s the big deal with this? Unfortunately it means that it’s impossible to track what adverts are being clicked, with the aim of removing low paying or MFA adverts using the competitive ad filter.

eCPM is up today, possibly because Google stopped arbitrage accounts. I hope it’s a sign of better things to come and Google will improve their filter to the extent that it would make the competitive ad filter redundant except for filtering out competitive adverts, like it was supposed to!

Dump Javascript at the end of your page

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You’ve seen it plenty of times before. A website loads but only the sidebar appears. The loading graphic in your browser is still spinning and there’s that “contacting …” or “loading …” message at the bottom of your window. Why?

The most common cause of this is because the site uses a chunk of Javascript loaded from a remote site. Think of those fancy chat widgets, Snap.com popups and even hit counters. If those sites are slow to load, they could make your site slow too. The best place to put that code is right at the bottom of the page, after all the content, if you can and it’s appropriate.

I just noticed this happening on Pro Blogger a few minutes ago. Darren’s c2.gostats.com stats are loaded just below the sidebar and because that site was responding slowly the main content part of his blog didn’t display immediately. This may be a storm in a teacup because the next time I refreshed it loaded fine but remember, first impressions count. You don’t want to keep a new visitor to your site waiting.

The ever pervasive Snap.com seems to suffer this sort of problem on a regular basis so be extra careful when you use their Javascript applet. If it takes a while to load, so will your blog.

To further confuse matters, there’s also a bug in Firefox that makes the “Transferring data from …” message appear longer than it should. The guys at Sphere noticed this after complaints their Javascript was loading slowly. It’s all a bit of a mess really!

Welcome Dublin!

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It’s now easier than ever to use Google Analytics thanks to the interface revamp it’s gone through. Michele had the scoop yesterday and I’m very impressed. From your dashboard you can drill down to various aspects of your website’s traffic.

One of those is a clickable map of the world that eventually led me to the following map of Ireland. That’s a lot of traffic from Dublin, but it’s probably something to do with the way Internet traffic in the country is routed. That, or the fact that a quarter of the population live there. Welcome Dublin people to Holy Shmoly!

eire.gif

keywordhits.gif

A few days ago I listed the keywords people use to visit my site but now it’s easier to find that information and dig deeper into archived traffic stats. Inside the new Analytics interface, go to “Traffic Sources” where you’ll find “Top Traffic Sources”. Click on the keywords for pretty graphs!

Update! Some people aren’t happy with the new upgrade. Chris Silver Smith thinks it’s a downgrade from the old interface.

Top 10 dodgy website keywords

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Would that be the top 10 keywords for a dodgy website, or top 10 dodgy keywords for a website?

It would be the latter actually. Thanks to the Keyword Rreport in Google Analytics I found out what the most searched for terms that brought people to Holy Shmoly! were and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

keywords.gif

At least “cgwd” is a Linux word.

There is a positive side to this however. A lot of keywords are used to find this blog. The top ten are only a small slice of the pie so even though those keywords drive a lot of traffic here they are not the main sources it.

keywordsgraph.gif

I found out about the Google Analytics Keyword Report through this post via James who kindly linked to my previous post!

What are the top ten keywords for your blog?