Combining Dropbox with portable apps makes the ultimate portable solution, for instance as a password syncer. Another very nice feature of Dropbox is a “public” folder that makes files available online - all you need to do is to copy or save a file to that folder on your computer and it becomes publicly available link on the Web.

Their wiki also has a useful list of tips and tricks for using Dropbox.

Link: Dropbox

No one market research tool is perfect and often it is best to look at more than one to get the information that you need. It is so much easier when they’re free! So here are four of the best free tools that you can use for competitive analysis.

Google Ad Planner

The [big] new kid on the block that launched a few months ago, and when it did it knocked comScore shares down by over twenty percent. In typical Google style it is free and all you need is a Google account - that’s why we love Google!. The reason why Google Ad Planner made such an impact on comScore shares is because Google has so much more data - and information - at their disposal and just like Search, they have the ability to crush anyone in that space. Ad Planner gathers its data from:

a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. link

Ad Planner has huge potential with their incredible database of marketing intelligence. Learn more about Ad Planner from this great post by Avinash Kaushik.

P.S. It is quite disturbing that they block stats to google.com, but not to Yahoo! or Microsoft! (You need to be logged in with your Google account to access these links)

Quantcast

The two year old company has been making quite a splash. Quantcast’s claim to fame is that they supplement panel data with server-level data from participating publishers via JavaScript tagging. What I do find really interesting is their approach towards bridging the gap between on-line and off-line marketing data: less people than cookies, rather than more people than circulation.

Addressing this challenge requires innovation in bridging the inherent differences between the directly measureable cookies and estimates of people. This is not unlike challenges that the media industry has previously faced in bridging the “what� (raw traffic) and the “who� (actual people) in Print. The magazine industry provides an analogy to the challenges in the digital space in that circulation is a “census� level data point (it represents the reported number of magazines printed and distributed) which is coupled with panel data for people-based adjustments (readers per copy, demographics, etc). As we shall see, in digital the correction factors are reversed (less people than cookies, rather than more people than circulation) but the hybrid approach leveraging raw circulation and panel data is relevant. link

Compete

CompeteInc, a research firm, also launched their competitive analytics service called Compete about 2 years ago and they are seen as the main Alexa alternative, mostly because of their toolbar. Compete collects it’s click stream data from participating ISPs, the Compete Toolbar and opt-in panels. Not everyone approved at first, but they have been quite busy as can be seen in their blog and they are continually improving.

However, they really are punting their premium services and are not giving enough away for free. Their free Site Analytics reports are the main attraction and they are excellent, but their Search Analytics and Referral Analytics are simply sample teasers. Perhaps they’ll loosen up now that Google has entered the market space!

Alexa

Alexa has been around for a decade in spite of all the criticism of their data collection methods and how their stats can be manipulated. Even McAfee SiteAdvisor warns that their toolbar could be spyware. However, it remains a handy tool for quickly checking Web site metrics and for doing sanity checks.

(The number shown is time in milliseconds to perform certain tasks.)

Chrome was much faster than Firefox which was much faster than IE. Of the frameworks, JQuery was generally fastest, with MooTools and Dojo a close second with Prototype and Yahoo! UI Selector a distant third. Note that it is a MooTools developed test so it may be biased, but it seems like an honestly objective test.

UPDATE: Matt Cutts has some interesting facts about their new browser. In particular I found it interesting that “Google Chrome uses WebKit for rendering, which is the same rendering engine as Apple’s Safari browser”. Considering that Google has been pro Firefox, I wonder what that means…?

Once you’ve installed the plugin and accepted the terms and conditions, you will start seeing the WASP icon in your browser’s status bar that tells you which tracking tools it has identified.

Clicking on the icon will open a sidebar with a tabbed view of all the tracking tools. Each tab represents a tracking instance on the page you are viewing, e.g. an ad, and shows the detailed data that is being sent to them.

WASP is a very useful debugging tool for implementing Web analytics solutions like Omniture because it gives you an easy way to see if you have tagged your Web site correctly. I used the “Omniture debugger” until recently when I heard about WASP in an Omniture training session.

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

To me it’s not clear that you have to publish your privacy policy on your Web site, but the privacy policy proposed by JenSense seems quite simple and clean so I will give it the benefit of the doubt. So without further a due, here’s Da Vinci Planet’s privacy policy.

1. Domain Name Ownership

The highest level of control is to be a domain owner by registering a top level domain (TLD). A domain name is an asset and owning one means that you have legal rights to it, but it also means that you can choose which name servers the domain should use. A whois lookup can show the domain ownership details as well as the name servers for the domain. Being a domain owner does not mean that you have access to the name or the Web servers or the site’s content, but it does mean you have the power to control it.

What about subdomains? Subdomains do not need to be registered; in fact they are free and TLD owners have nothing to do with sub-domains. Name server administrators for TLDs simply add records to the DNS to create subdomains.

2. Name Server Control

Domain name servers (DNS) are like address books for domain names. In a typical address book one might have home telephone numbers, cell numbers, fax numbers, postal addresses and email addresses. Name servers tell computers where to go to when looking for different contact methods for domain names, like email or Web sites. Having control of a domain’s name servers means that you can point the domain and its sub-domains wherever you want to, as well as their email addresses.

3. Web Server Control

The name servers of a domain name would normally have the address as described above of the domain’s Web site. Such an address is normally a DNS A record or a CNAME and tells the world which Web server(s) to go to. Webmasters of these servers can configure them to respond as needed to requests, e.g. they have the ability to create URLs and redirects under that domain name, but they cannot create sub-domains and they cannot change the IP address of a domain (i.e. A or CNAME records).

What about URL Redirects?

The lowest level of domain control is when you can’t do any of the above, but you are able to redirect another domain to the one in question. In this case one doesn’t really have any control over the main domain and so it doesn’t count as a fourth level of control, but it is common to redirect a domain within one’s control to another URL.

Now, I think that I am actually ready to give up my desktop, but I’m not quite comfortable to do it the Deskktoptwo way. It’s an intriguing solution, but somehow it seems too old school and I don’t think it’s how we’re going to get rid of our desktops. But it worth checking out and knowing about.

* A troptical year is 365.242190 days long. A regular year has 365 days and a leap year 366.
* February 2008 has 5 Fridays, the last time that happened was in 1980.
* The Gregorian calendar was adopted to account for leap years. The Julian calendar had too many.

Read more interesting info about leap years at timeanddate.com

Here are my key take-aways from the info revealed on the Webmaster Central Blog:

1) Subdomains and subdirectories. They claim that there’s no difference as far as Google is concerned between subdomains and subdirectories. So hypothetically a page under iphone.apple.com is considered equal in Google’s eyes to a page under apple.com/iphone. I thought that one should have an advantage over the other, but after thinking about it I couldn’t find a reasonable advantage for either and so to me their claim makes sense.

2) Underscores vs. dashes in URLs. For now, dashes are better, but Google is getting better at differentiating words and punctuation so in time it will be less important.

3) Friendly URLs matter. Keywords in URLs DO matter, but something interesting that I learned today was that to meet the technical requirements for Google News, URLs have to contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. So it seems that a good URL strategy is to make it friendly, but to append a unique content/article/post ID to the end. That’s definitely true if your content is newsworthy!

4) Sitemaps don’t really matter that much. That is as long as your site has good navigation and Google is able to find all your content easily otherwise.

To me it’s a relief to know that sitemaps aren’t such a big deal, because creating sitemaps for complex Web sites IS a big deal. It is better to rather focus on the navigation and usability of a Web site.

Understand the Best Practices for Upgrading

The WordPress upgrade instructions are very good and include details on how to backup your WordPress database. Now backing up is probably the single most important best practice and the upgrade instructions includes a specific step to verify your backups, but you need to make sure you know how to restore your backups. I have been using the MySQL Administrator to do full daily, weekly and monthly backups, but when things went wrong with the upgrade I was surprised how unintuitive the restore process was. In fact, restoring seemed more risky than resolving the upgrade issues I decided to rather figure out the upgrade incompatibilities. Had I known how to restore - with confidence - I would have been able to recover much quicker. A blogger is likely to have upgrade issues at some point in time and it will almost certainly be caused by a plugin, so please think about that before you go plugin crazy.

Reactivate Plugins Very Carefully

The upgrade instructions explain that you should first deactivate all your plugins, then do the actual upgrade and then reactivate your plugins. I followed these instructions, but it’s with the reactivation where things went wrong for me. The Jerome’s Keywords plugin like many others makes database updates when it’s activated. What I didn’t realize was that when I reactivated it, it apparently conflicted with some of the WordPress 2.3 upgrades. What I should have done was to run the new Jerome’s Keywords import feature, which can be found under Manage, Import in the WordPress admin interface and not reactivate the plugin. While that in itself wouldn’t have made the upgrade flawless because I also had to make theme updates, it would have prevented my blog data from becoming partially corrupted. The solution to my specific problems with the Jerome’s Keywords plugin was:

1. After I had upgraded and reactivated the plugin, I deactivated it again.

2. Reran the Jerome’s Plugin import in the admin interface. It returned zero records this time, but it seemed to fix the database structure.

3. Updated my theme to use WordPress’ tag functions rather than the plugin’s.

4. Created Apache rewrite rules to convert plus signs to dashes. The Jerome’s Keyword plugin uses plus (+) signs to separate words while the new WordPress tag functionality uses dashes. This seemingly simple rewrite rule probably has a simple solution, but I resorted to a list of less elegant, static rules like:


RewriteRule ^tag/portable\+apps(.*)$ /tag/portable-apps$1 [R=permanent,L]

Other WordPress Upgrade Tips

When all is said and done I am happy to have completed the upgrade and in retrospect it was a good learning experience.

Here’s a tip on how PDFCreator can be used to help with filing expense reports. When you’re making hotel reservations or airline bookings while working remotely and without access to a local printer, you can print your reservation confirmations to PDFCreator and save them as PDFs on your computer. Now you can email the PDF version of the confirmation to someone who can print it for you and you have easy access to your invoices when it’s time to file your expense report.

Wikia Search launched today and while there has been much criticism, their principals make total sense:

Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.

Community - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.

Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.

Privacy - Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.

Google gives “guidelines” on how to make Web sites more SEO friendly, but why not offer complete transparency to their algorithm? The first reaction is because the algorithm is very, very complex and that an open source algorithm could be abused by those that find loopholes. Well it is already being abused by Black Hat SEO practices and that is exactly why it should be socially driven and open source! It is the very reason why open source solutions like Linux and Apache are a success: Open and engaged communities have much more combined knowledge than closed communities can ever have - even more than the smart Google engineers. For now Google is riding the wave that Microsoft did in the nineties, but sooner or later they will come under pressure and will be faced with the decision to open up their algorithm or not.

To me, the four principals of Internet search that Wikia Search has identified defines what Google means by “don’t be evil” and while their alpha release may be disappointing I applaud Wikia for doing this. Just like open source supporters have fought Microsoft, I believe the social computing community will be fighting Google some day. An ungrateful irony.

1) Remove copy protection using DVD43
DVD43 gets rid of the copy protection nonsense. If you try to run DVD Shrink without decryption software you may get “DVD Shrink encoutered an error and cannot continue: Copy protection error“. Once DVD43 is installed (which requires a reboot) it runs in the backround and removes any copy protection.

2) Compress and copy using DVD Shrink
DVD Shrink compresses commercial DVDs to fit on to a regular 4GB DVD. Doom9 has an excellent article on how to use DVD Shrink.

In addition, Revo Uninstaller also comes bundled with other useful utilities like the Autorun Manager which let’s you enable or disable programs that autostart at Windows startup and the Junk Files Cleaner which scans and deletes temporary files that should have been deleted.

Revo Uninstaller is portable, free and with no spyware or tricks - a great productivity tool just the way we like it.

Revo Uninstaller (Look for the Portable version download link)

Website Analysis Tools

1. Google Analytics

This should be your starting point, it doesn’t have to be Google Analytics, there are many other Web analytics tools, but you have to have a good Web analytics tool. Using your Web analytics tool you can see what keywords or phrases people are searching for to find your site, which search engines drive the most traffic and what content users are finding. There are advanced Google Analytics tricks that you can use to get more out of the tool.

2. Google Webmaster Tools

This is where you create a Google sitemap and get to see how often Google indexes your home page. Webmaster Tools offers pretty much everything that Google is willing to tell you about your site and how it’s indexed. Google recently added the ability to set the geographic target of your Website and you can also opt-in to enhanced image search which can improve indexing and search quality of images on your Website.

3. Yahoo! Site Explorer

Yahoo’s version of Webmaster Tools. It doesn’t provide as much information as Google’s, but you can add a sitemap or RSS feed and get some information from Yahoo! about your site. Yahoo doesn’t display cached dates like Google does, but Yahoo! Site Explorer shows you when each page on your site (and other sites) was indexed or cached.

4. Xinu

Provides a dashboard view of key SEO indicators of a Web site, including PageRank, number of pages indexed and backlinks. The Diagnostics pane provides details on things like domain name, page size, HTML tags and gives you a thumbs up rating. It even tells you how long your site has existed and the blog owner.

5. Poodle Predictor

A good search engine simulator tool. Enter your URL, click on “Poodle Search” and then on “Diagnostic View”. There are many other search engine simulator tools, but I like how this one displays the results.

6. SEO for Firefox

A Firefox plugin that provides easy access to SEO related information about a page or link. When enabled it highlights “nofollow” links in red.

Keyword Research Tools

7. Google Trends

Search engines don’t share detailed search statistics, but you can use Google Trends to get a good idea of how popular search terms are. If you have a keyword that ranks #1 then you can use that as a base for comparison against other keywords to get a gauge for how much traffic one could expect from those keywords. Since the main purpose of the tool is to see trends it is of course very useful to see if keywords are growing in popularity. There’s also a section called Hot Trends that lists the current 100 “hot” keywords. These keywords offer good AdWords opportunities.

8. Microsoft adCenter Labs

As described in a previous post on keyword search funnels and demographic predictions, adCenter Labs gives a very interesting perspective on keywords and helps you to better understand what your users look like and the thought process that they go through when doing searches. The Search Funnel and Keyword Forecast tools are particularly cool.

9. Yahoo! Buzz Index

A service by Yahoo! that resembles Google’s Hot Trends. The Yahoo! Buzz Index shows the day’s top 20 searches in various categories including actors, movies and sports.

10. Keyword Discovery

Search term suggestion tool. They offer a free tool that lists up to 100 top keywords for a given keyword or phrase ranked by the number of searches over the last 12 months. The premium version of Keyword Discovery has a lot more functionality and a much slicker interface than Wordtracker.

11. Wordtracker

Probably the most popular subscription based keyword research tool, but like Keyword Discovery they also offer a free keyword suggestion tool that lists the top 100 search terms ranked by searches.

12. Google AdWords Keyword Tool

The tool is really intended for paid search research, but it is a useful keyword suggestion tool.

Browsershots is a free, open source solution for your problem. Browsershots takes screenshots of sites and displays the screen captures in .png files. You can use Browsershots as a free online service, but what makes this product cool is that it’s available as an open source (written in Python) download so that you can run it on an internal server. This is very useful when you need to test a site that isn’t live or accessible from the Internet yet.

The catch with the download version is that it uses “screenshot factoriesâ€? to produce the screenshots and that these factories need to run on the operating systems and browsers that they produce screenshots for. So you need to have computers or virtual instances with the operating systems and browsers that you want to use as screenshot factories which requires a fair amount of infrastructure and support. It also means that when a new version of a browser or OS comes out you may need to create several more screenshot factories. So how is this better than simply having a bunch of test machines? The advantage is scalability and ease of use because multiple users have access directly from their desktops. One downside is that users get to see screenshots of what a particular Web page looks like and can’t interact with it so you cannot test interactivity like DHTML and AJAX.

There are other solutions like using VMWare virtual appliances for each of the operating system/browser combinations. This is a quicker and possibly easier solution, but doesn’t scale as well with multiple users (or testers). Another solution is using a high-end service like Gomez and while they offer a lot more it comes with a price!

What is OpenID?

It’s a way to identify and authenticate yourself using a trusted Web site of your choice. The “trusted Web site of your choice” has to be an OpenID provider. To register with a Web site that supports OpenID all you need to do is provide them with the URL of your OpenID provider then login at your OpenID provider’s Web site. So basically the login happens at your OpenID provider instead of at the site you’re trying to register with.

OpenID is a way to authenticate yourself to various places (websites) by verifying your identity as the owner of a particular URL (say, a website of your own). Instead of giving a username and password to a login form, you just give it your URL.

The nice thing about OpenID is that you can use your own Web site as your OpenID. That does not mean that you need to set up anything special on your Web site. With a couple of lines of HTML code on your Web site you can delegate OpenID authority to another site. That way you can transparently use a trusted OpenID provider of your choice to do the hard work, while keeping your own domain name as your OpenID.

How do you use your Web site as your OpenID?
It’s a two step process.

1) Choose an OpenID provider.
There are many OpenID providers to choose from and chances are that you already have an OpenID. Sites like Technorati, wordpress.com, etc. provide OpeinIDs, but like most I didn’t trust other sites and wanted to do it on my own so I tried phpMyID. I was quite pleased with my accomplishment, but then I started reading and learning about OpenID security issues and decided that it’s best to use a site dedicated to the purpose like myOpenID. You will find statements like “OpenID: it’s about *identity* and not *trust*“, which definitely doesn’t build trust! So it’s a good reason to choose a trustworthy OpenID provider like myOpenID or VeriSign’s Personal Identity Provider.

2) Configure your site to point to your OpenID provider.
Once you’ve registered with an OpenID provider, you can use the OpenID URL that they provide ar your OpenID. But it’s much nicer to use your own Web site as your identity (heck, it should be much better!). OpenID allows you to use your own Web site as your OpenID and delegate authentication to another site. For example, my OpenID is, of course, http://www.davinciplanet.com. My OpenID provider, for now, is myOpenID and to do that all I need is to include the following lines of HTML in my site:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server"/>
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://davinciplanet.myopenid.com/” />
<meta http-equiv=”X-XRDS-Location”
content=”http://www.myopenid.com/xrds?username=davinciplanet.myopenid.com”
/>


What does OpenID give me?

On some sites like jyte you can enter your OpenID URL instead of registering to “make a claim”. Many blogs now accept OpenID which means that you don’t need to register to comment.

What doesn’t OpenID give me?

Single sign-on. It’s a great idea with great potential and being open source it is a perfect fit to be an open source/Web 2.0 hit. But, it’s in the adoption phase and very few people understand it. And very few sites support it.

Resources

phpMyID. An OpenID solution for your own site. I have security issues with this implementation, which is why I switched to myOpenID.com. Specifically, authentication using phpMyID doesn’t seem secure to me. Either way, sites like myOpenID offer a lot more funcionality (besides ssl security).
]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/is-openid-the-answer-to-single-sign-on/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/domain-kiting/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/domain-kiting/#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2007 02:38:11 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/08/20/domain-kiting/ MarkMonitor released its Summer 2007 Brandjacking Index, a quarterly report that measures the effect of online threats to brands. The report describes trends of how domain names are used in scamming efforts to hijack well-known brands.

Cybersquatting is a well known form of domain hijacking, but according the report it only grew by 8% in the last quarter, compared to newer and lesser known scams like domain kiting which grew at 242%. Cybersquatting is when someone registers a domain name which contains a brand, slogan or trademark to which the registrant has no right. Owners of registered brands, slogans and trademarks can quite easily approach cybersquatters and gain ownership of the domains. Domain kiting, however, is an advanced hack of cybersquatting and is much more difficult to fight.

Domain Kiting: The process whereby domains are registered and dropped within the 5 day ICANN grace period, and then registered again for another 5 days. Kiting a domain lets the registrant gain the benefit of ownership without ever paying for the domain.

The highest growth rates of kiting is experienced in the media industry. Kiters rotate their domain names through registrars and some registrars simply ignore the practice - it seems they actually thrive on this business!

The report says a lot about spamming and phishing in the pharmaceutical drug industry, but I’m surprised that there’s no mention of stock spam because I have been getting a lot of that lately!

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/domain-kiting/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/google-hacks-project/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/google-hacks-project/#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2007 02:33:19 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/08/15/google-hacks-project/ This Zurich based Google engineer has a few interesting Google hacks, check out his interesting projects. Most of these hacks use algorithms to parse Google search results.

I also like his thinking that while Google is a great company and they produce great products, they are a power house that keeps many secrets and can easily become corrupt. It would be much more comforting and encouraging if it were an open source project and everyone had free access to the search algorithms with the ability to contribute. Sure there will be smartasses that benefit in the short run, but an open source community will find ways to hone the ever growing algorithm closer to what people want from it. Google’s income comes from its ad network, what is the downside of making their search open source?

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/google-hacks-project/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/autocomplete-words-and-phrases-with-letmetype/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/autocomplete-words-and-phrases-with-letmetype/#comments Tue, 10 Jul 2007 03:19:19 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/07/09/autocomplete-words-and-phrases-with-letmetype/ LetMeType is an open source application that suggests words and phrases as-you-type. The clever little application builds an index of words that you type and pops up with auto-complete suggestions of words as you are typing. LetMeType is built into the OS and so it works in all applications. Like PureText, a plain text copy tool, this is a small little app and it doesn’t take much time to get used to, but can give you great productivity boost.

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/autocomplete-words-and-phrases-with-letmetype/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/a-useless-or-not-javascript-hack/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/a-useless-or-not-javascript-hack/#comments Tue, 12 Jun 2007 13:02:09 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/06/12/a-useless-or-not-javascript-hack/ Since I haven’t posted for over a month, I figured I could at least share this useless Javascript hack. Actually it may have some use but the ethics may be questionable… Anyway, it’s quite fun! On any Web page, enter the following in your browser’s address bar and hit enter. You can then delete and edit the Web page contents.

javascript: document.body.contentEditable = "true"; document.designMode= "on"; void 0

For example, I went to Google and did a search for the “best blog ever”. Needless to say Da Vinci Planet wasn’t number 1 (or 2, or 3…), but then after pasting the text above into the address bar I was able to edit the Web page and voilà I’m number 1!

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/a-useless-or-not-javascript-hack/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/advanced-google-analytics-hacks/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/advanced-google-analytics-hacks/#comments Fri, 11 May 2007 02:48:02 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/05/10/advanced-google-analytics-hacks/ In a previous post on the best Web analytics solutions I mentioned that in my view Omniture is the clear leader in enterprise Web analytics and that Google Analytics is the best free solution. Omniture has spoilt me and I often wish I could get a little more out of GA (which I use on Da Vinci Planet). After some digging around I found a few hacks that enable valuable reports in Google Analytics, including full referrer URLs, file downloads, and custom segmentation.

1. How to track file downloads, clicks on outbound links or Flash

Google Analytics provides an easy way to track clicks on links that lead to file downloads like PDFs or MP3s, outbound links and Flash. Simply include an onClick event in the hyperlink that calls the urchinTracker JavaScript. Link.

2. Integrate Google Website Optimizer with Google Analytics

Website Optimizer is a multivariate web page testing tool that can help you understand which web page designs really work. It uses a javascript code snippet very similar to Google Analytics. However, Website Optimizer only uses conversion rate as the metric to determine which combination of variations is best. You can use GA with Website Optimizer to use more valuable metrics like Page Value, Avg. Time and Bounce Rate. Link.

3. Identify additional search engines in the Referral reports

By default, GA tracks referrals from 20 search engines, however, you can add additional search engines by adding _uOsr and _uOkw variables to your tracking code. When you look closely at your Referring Source report you may notice some sources where the Medium is “referral” and that are search results on Web sites that should come through as “organic”. Link.

4. Tracking full referrer URLs

A common complaint about Google Analytics is that it truncates URLs at the end of the pagename and cuts off the querystring. So on sites that use query parameters as page identifiers, some reports will show aggregate numbers for those pages. There are two ways one can address this issue:
1. Use the urchinTracker to record the whole URL. Link
2. Create a User-defined report by using Custom Filters. With Custom Filters you can manipulate data before GA simplifies it and therefore one can do lots of interesting things like extracting segments into extra profiles. Link.

5. Track AdSense clicks

There is a lot of debate on the legality of using GA to track AdSense clicks, but if you are interested this is how you can do it. Link.

6. Custom Segmentation

The utmSetVar variable can be used to assign users to a certain segment. E.g. you could use the variable to track users that viewed a particular page. The variable populates the User-Defined report (Marketing Optimization > Visitor Segment Performance > User-Defined) report. Note that only the first value of this variable is recorded. Link.

7. Use link tagging to track campaigns

You can use GA to track all your campaigns including email campaigns. AdWords campaigns are tracked by default if the account is linked to your GA account, however you need to tag your links in order to use campaign tracking for other campaigns. Link tagging simply requires you to add certain parameters to your URL and Google has a nifty URL Builder for the purpose. Link.

UPDATE: The new version of Google Analytics is out and while the reports have changed the configuration and advanced tricks mentioned above have not. Phew!

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/advanced-google-analytics-hacks/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/reasons-to-use-portable-applications/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/reasons-to-use-portable-applications/#comments Sun, 06 May 2007 22:57:23 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/05/06/reasons-to-use-portable-applications/ Most people know that I am a portable app fan and that I would almost exclusively try to use portable applications or Web applications rather than “installs”. The problem with regular, non-portable applications is that they rely on the Windows registry and that they are typically distributed in many folders. So when you need to reinstall Window all your settings are lost and you need to completely reinstall the applications. In this post I would like to describe the reasons why I prefer portable apps and how you can manage them better.

Why use portable apps?

Light weight. Portable applications do not require installation and therefore (normally) do not fill your registry with unnecessary junk. So one does not experience performance degradation when you add apps. Besides, portable apps are normally created to fit on USB drives so they are small and efficient.
Portable. Portability doesn’t only apply to USB drives, it also allows you to copy your apps between computers. So for instance, I keep all my portable apps in my d:\Portable folder and can easily copy that folder to other computers without needing to install the applications on the other computer. That way I can have my favorite apps on my home and work computer. By synching (see below) them up I am also able to keep all data related to the portable apps on both computers. Another nice thing about portable apps is that when you reinstall Windows or have a re-image as we often do at work, you do not need to download, install and configure your apps because they’re all self contained in your portable folder.

PStart application launcher

PStart is a simple tray tool to start user defined applications. PStart is itself a portable application and can be used to launch your portable apps similar to the Windows Start button. The nice thing about PStart is that if you copy it along with your portable apps to a USB key or other computer all the settings get copied as well. So it provides an easy way to launch your portable apps the same way on any computer.

Synchronizing portable applications between computers

I use SyncBack (look for the freeware download) for regular backups, but I also use it to synchronize my portable apps folders between computers. By scheduling a daily sync I have access to the same apps and data on my home and my work computer.

A nice side-effect of applications that are built to be portable is that they are normally not copy protected. Copy protection would defeat portability and as a result they are normally free.

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/reasons-to-use-portable-applications/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/caching-tutorial-for-web-authors-and-webmasters/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/caching-tutorial-for-web-authors-and-webmasters/#comments Sun, 06 May 2007 12:59:22 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/05/06/caching-tutorial-for-web-authors-and-webmasters/ Here’s a useful guide for everything related to Web caching. Webmasters inevitably have cache related issues at some point in time. The author describes different types of caches and how to control them.

Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/caching-tutorial-for-web-authors-and-webmasters/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/google-maps-humor/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/google-maps-humor/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2007 19:44:23 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/google-maps-humor/

Google Maps has a sense of humor. Try this:

1. Go to google.com.
2. Click on Maps.
3. Click on Get Directions.
4. From: New York, New York.
5. To: Paris, France.
(Or go directly to the link here)
6. Then, read line #23.
7. Laugh.

Oh, and it will take about 29 days 7 hours!

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/google-maps-humor/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/note-taking-applications/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/note-taking-applications/#comments Sun, 15 Apr 2007 23:51:55 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/04/15/note-taking-applications/ Over the last couple of weeks I tested various note-taking applications. I was looking for software to help me to better organize my typical daily notes, memos, ideas, to-do lists and to clean up the myriads of text files that I have used for the purpose. KeePass is perfect for saving and organizing passwords, but there are many other important snippets of text that didn’t have a good home. The criterion is that I wanted a free, light-weight and portable note-taking application to help me be more productive. There are hundreds of on-line tools, but I prefer off-line tools for this purpose and I also discovered dozens of sticky note applications which I find generally messy. Wherever I looked, EverNote showed up and it turned out to be my favorite, but other applications that I reviewed include TiddlyWiki, NeoMem and wikidPad.

EverNote

EverNote can easily capture, store and quickly access common everyday memos like to-do lists, expenses, telephone numbers, and Web clips. With EverNote you can save your notes in categories, which really behave more like tags. It supports text, HTML, images and drag & drop type functionality. The EverNote database can be encrypted and you can also encrypt text within a note. Another nice feature is neat printing functionality - something that is missing from many similar tools. It’s not as light-weight as I had hoped (the portable version is about 12MB in size) and it took me a while to familiarize myself, but now I love it!

TiddlyWiki

When I first discovered TiddlyWiki I saw it as a very neat piece of HTML code, but didn’t really see a purpose for it. More recently I realized its use as a note-taking application. It’s highly portable and has amazingly cool functionality for a single HTML file. Some users have complained that it becomes slow when it grows too large. There are also many enhanced versions like GTDTiddlyWiki and MonkeyGTD, both Getting Things Done adaptations of TiddlyWiki.

wikidPad

wikidPad isn’t portable and it’s also not really light-weight, but it’s another very popular choice. It’s a standalone desktop wiki and actually very neat and fun to play with. It’s main feature is the ease with which you can cross-link notes, but it lacks rich features and the ability to copy and paste HTML and images.

NeoMem

NeoMem is like a word processor and database combined. It’s a more technical solution that allows you to define “classes” which describe the items that you want to store information about. It’s a good application for storing structured lists, but I found it too complex for regular note-taking.

Others Solutions

For a comprehensive list of mostly on-line tools, check out Fifty Ways to Take Notes. I left out Microsoft OneNote because it’s not free and some other solutions, like ZuluPad don’t offer much in their free versions. For now I am going to stick with EverNote.

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/note-taking-applications/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/demographic-predictions-for-keywords-using-adcenter/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/demographic-predictions-for-keywords-using-adcenter/#comments Sun, 08 Apr 2007 14:05:25 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/04/08/demographic-predictions-for-keywords-using-adcenter/ If you own, manage or are in some way involved in a Web site then chances are that you want to know what kind of demographic you are attracting. Are they male or female, young or old? It’s especially interesting when you’re considering paid keywords to attract users. For instance, you may have been trying to target the hippies from the 60’s using the keyword flower power; meanwhile you are attracting young women in their twenties and early thirties! Microsoft adCenter Labs, the R&D team for paid search at Microsoft, offers surprisingly cool paid search researching tools. Their analysis is based on MSN Search data which represents a significant sample group, even if they’re small compared to Google. Their Demographics Prediction tool returns this interesting and visually pleasing result for flower power:

The Search Funnels tool offers another very interesting Web analysis. It answers the question: What do users search for after they searched for the keyword in question. E.g. what did users search for after they first searched for flower power? adCenter helps you visualize and analyze your customers’ search behaviors.

These kinds of Web analytics tools are very useful for effective paid search campaigns. Some of the other tools that they offer are:

• Keyword forecast: Forecast the impressions count and demographic predictions using one or more search terms.
• Seasonal keyword forecast: Forecast the seasonality patterns of search queries
• Detecting online commercial intent: Find out if your customer intends to buy, sell or complete another online transaction based on their search queries and/or other sites visited

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/demographic-predictions-for-keywords-using-adcenter/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/making-money-from-blogging/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/making-money-from-blogging/#comments Wed, 04 Apr 2007 04:15:57 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/04/03/making-money-from-blogging/ John Chow has a fascinating post (and blog for that matter) on how he is making money from blogging. He decided to monetize his blog as an experiment to see if he could make money for himself from the Internet. John, like most Web professionals, has experience in telling others how to run their Web sites, but he wondered if he could make money himself… like most Web professionals do! Turns out he is doing very well - good enough to make it a full time job, but he also shows that it takes dedication and hard work.

Here’s how he’s been doing:
September          $352.94 (first month as a moneymaking blog)
October          $1,361.64
November         $2,139.93
December         $2,790.05
January          $3,440.66
February         $7,011.05
March            $8,545.25


He’s also kind enough to show the breakdown of his income for March - all from smart marketing tools:
ReviewMe:        $2,400.00
Affiliate Sales: $1,962.20
Text Links Ads:  $1,308.06
Google AdSense:  $1,129.60
Direct Ad Sales:   $625.00
Vibrant Media:     $357.08
Kontera:           $296.12
TTZ Media:         $278.92
FeedBurner Ads:    $188.27
Grand Total:     $8,545.25

(I noticed that he also has Adsense-like ads by ActionAds.)

The traffic didn’t come for free, but it was relatively cheap at $480.75 for March (mostly AdWords). Now, $480/month is a lot of money for an amateur blogger, but it goes to show that a little money can go a long way.

An interesting expense that he incurred is what he calls Google IM ads to other blogs. “Google IM ads” could be a way of spreading the love (”who knows who”) or it could be a form of AdSense arbitrage, or - most likely - it’s a combination: spreading the love and making money. The perfect mix. Huge hooray for corporate marketers that are on board.

He may have been lucky, but he proves that one can make a decent income from blogging. Can he keep it up? I bet he can because, like any other job, it takes time and passion to do it well and he seems to have both.

Why do I do it..? Passion! I am a Web professional and I love this stuff and so it has become a hobby. The Adsense income was a “why not?”, but now it justifies the hobby ;). I also do it to encourage other people to blog about their passions because it is such an amazing forum to spread knowledge.

Make Money On The Internet - johnchow.com

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/making-money-from-blogging/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/productivity-tools-wordweb/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/productivity-tools-wordweb/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2007 12:04:35 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/04/02/productivity-tools-wordweb/ WordWeb is a free English dictionary and thesaurus application, and can be used to look up words in just one click. This is a very handy productivity tool and it’s really fast. I found their “for free use” licensing agreement quite amusing (though I fail on both accounts!):

You may use the program free of charge indefinitely only if
* You take at most 4 flights (2 return flights) in any 12 month period
* AND you do not own or regularly drive an SUV (sports utility vehicle).

I also like that it can be installed as a portable USB application (under Advanced Options during install).

Via Lifehacker

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/productivity-tools-wordweb/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/copy-dvd-to-ipod-using-freeware/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/copy-dvd-to-ipod-using-freeware/#comments Mon, 26 Mar 2007 02:18:56 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/03/25/copy-dvd-to-ipod-using-freeware/ You finally caved and got the first season of 24 or Lost on DVD. Now you’re hooked and you would use every opportunity to watch it. Then you realize: “Hey, my iPod! It’s perfect for traveling and for the gym, but how can I copy my DVDs to my iPod?!� . So you do some Googling, but you discover that there are hundreds of solutions out there and, worse, that copying DVDs has become a money making scheme! Besides that, nobody tells you that there are two big technical problems with copying or converting DVDs:

1) Most commercial DVDs are encrypted for copy protection;
2) There are many encoding variables (bitrates, aspect ratios etc.).

It isn’t publicized, but commercial DVDs are normally copy protected with encryption technology (including region codes) and most commercial DVD copy software does not allow users to copy protected DVDs. Without going into the legalities suggested in #1 above or the complexities suggested in #2 above, here is a free solution to copy DVD to iPod. It’s really very easy, but the first time will take a few minutes longer.

Step 1: Decrypt DVD using DVD43

1) Download and install DVD43. AnyDVD (http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvd.html) is another option, but it’s not free.

2) After downloading and installing DVD43 you will need to reboot your computer. DVD43 runs as a service so you do not need to do anything to enable the decryption besides watching the yellow smiley face … turn into a little devil … and then turn to a green smiley face when you insert the DVD you want to copy.

Step 2: Rip DVD to iPod mp4 format using Handbrake

1) Download and install Handbrake (Windows GUI version)

2) In the Source section:

* Click on Browse and select the TS_VIDEO folder in your DVD drive.
* Select the Read Video button.
* Select OK.
* Select the View Data button. This will return all the titles on the DVD.
* Select the title you want to copy and click the Select Title button.
* Optional: Select DVD Chapters.
Take note of the Aspect Ratio value shown at the bottom of the Source section. Example: 1.78

3) In the Destination section:

* Click on Destination and browse to the folder where you want to save the movie. Enter a File name and select mp4 as the Save movie type.
* For Encoder, select .H.264 (iPod)
* For Audio Encoder, select AAC.
* For Height/Width, select the option that matched the aspect ratio that you noted in Step 1:

• For 1.33:1: 320 x 240
• For 1.78:1: 368 x 208
• For 2.35:1: 384 x 160

4) In the bottom section:

* Leave Picture Settings, Audio Settings, H.264 and Query Editor as is.
* Video Settings: Enter 768 into the Video BitRate text box and leave everything else default.
* Optional: Set number of processors under Advanced Settings.
* Finally, hit the Encode Video button at the bottom.
* Hit OK on the start encoding message. A command line window will open the ripping process will start.

Step 3: Copy your mp4(s) to your iPod

Use iTunes to copy your mp4(s) to your iPod in the usual way.

Additional information

Handbrake is really a CLI (command line) tool and the GUI that is used in this post, really just builds and executes the command line instruction. In the GUI you can see the resulting command line instruction by selecting the “Query Editor” tab and hitting Generate Query Now. Now, you can go further and use this “query” to script batch copying by copying it into a .bat file (note that you will need to replace hbtest.exe in the query with hbcli.exe for it to work).

There are other free solutions like the ones below, but they seem to me to be more cumbersome. For example DVD Decryptor is a powerful DVD decryption program, but DVD43 does it on the fly. Anyway, here are other solutions you could try:
* Lifehacker.com - Alpha Geek: Copy DVDs to your iPod [using DVD Decryptor and Videora iPod Converter]
* All Things Marked - HOWTO: Convert movies to iPod format [for free] [using 3GP Converter]

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/copy-dvd-to-ipod-using-freeware/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/title-tags-seo-results/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/title-tags-seo-results/#comments Sat, 24 Mar 2007 12:19:58 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/03/24/title-tags-seo-results/ A couple of months ago I changed the way that this blog’s browser titles are constructed, by placing the keywords first and the blog name last. I explained it in detail as well as the initial results in a post titled How Do HTML Title Tags Affect SEO?. For about two months I saw a negative change in my page rankings, but suddenly my rankings returned and improved. This chart shows the change over time.

So I am pleased to say that all three keywords traced rank better now. What I also learned in the process is that Google seriously penalizes certain changes to pages and that it can take a few weeks to months for the rankings to return.

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/title-tags-seo-results/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/universal-extractor-the-portable-application-seekers-best-friend/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/universal-extractor-the-portable-application-seekers-best-friend/#comments Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:56:11 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/03/20/universal-extractor-the-portable-application-seekers-best-friend/ As a portable application addict, I have become rather resistant to installing applications. But then again, quite frequently, I want to try out new applications that typically seem to require installation. For example, applications that can be downloaded as Windows Installer (.msi) packages appear to need to be “installed”. However, quite often developers simply package their applications that way to make it easier for their users to install, yet the applications don’t really need to be installed and can run as portable applications. The Universal Extractor was designed as an easy, convenient way to extract files from installation packages. The Universal Extractor is itself available as an portable app (look for the UniExtract Binary Archive download link). Using this app you can extract the files of a .msi or .exe installation file, extract it to a folder and test if if works without installation. Note that this is not a hack to get larger, more complex applications to run as portable apps.

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/universal-extractor-the-portable-application-seekers-best-friend/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/web-30-the-semantic-web/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/web-30-the-semantic-web/#comments Sat, 10 Mar 2007 22:24:18 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/03/10/web-30-the-semantic-web/ There is so much hype around Web 2.0, yet very few people seem to really know what it is. I recently heard about someone suggesting that they were going to redesign their site this year to “make it Web 2.0�; and next year to “Web 3.0�. I thought that Web 2.0 was a stretch for many companies and few understood it, never mind Web 3.0! What is Web 3.0 anyway?! I figured this was just big talk, but decided to look into it because Web 2.0 is very real and I guess eventually a newer generation Web will follow Web 2.0.

My concern with the “next year we upgrade to Web 3.0″ suggestion is that while the term Web 2.0 has been around for a couple of years, it is barely starting to mature. Web 2.0 is all about social computing: Blogs, wikis, syndication, mashups, user generated content (UGC) and using ajax to make Websites more interactive. It trusts the community and empowers them to contribute and police content. Very few corporate Websites have ventured into this terrain. They would like to invite and build community, but dare not open the doors.

So what about Web 3.0? As it turns out people are, at this point, just speculating what Web 3.0 is going to be. According Wikipedia Web 3.0, a.k.a. the Semantic Web, is “an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily�. Some people define it as Web 2.0 + artificial intelligence (AI). Others as a “world wide database�.

The graph below was created by Radar Networks and shows a believable prediction of the evolution of the Web.

So I believe we have a couple more years before Web 2.0 will be fully embraced by enterprises and only after that will Web 3.0 even start to get defined. I also believe that Web 3.0 will be more elegantly simple than what people are predicting because people love “simplicity� – just ask Google.

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/web-30-the-semantic-web/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/web-20-explained-in-video/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/web-20-explained-in-video/#comments Sat, 03 Mar 2007 16:20:15 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/03/03/web-20-explained-in-video/ A picture says a thousand words and so I guess a video says a thousand pictures This video plays with words and really does explain Web 2.0 faster than words or pictures can do alone. It’s a mini lecture on social computing: The evolution of the Web into Web 2.0 and how Web 2.0, the “Machine”, is us and how it is using us to grow. It demonstrates how user generated content, tagging, blogs, and wikis have revolutionized the Web and that we need to rethink how we do things. The video moves very fast, but it’s worth watching twice.

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/web-20-explained-in-video/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/google-talk-portable-app/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/google-talk-portable-app/#comments Sat, 24 Feb 2007 16:47:13 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/02/24/google-talk-portable-app/ Crazypack contains a number of useful portable applications and in particular Google Talk and Opera Browser. Doing a search on Google for “Google Talk Portable” doesn’t bring back many promising solutions so I was quite happy to find this one (and it works). I preferred to not use the pstart that comes bundled with Crazypack, so I only copied the individual portable apps that I wanted to my USB drive.

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/google-talk-portable-app/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/productivity-tools-winsnap/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/productivity-tools-winsnap/#comments Sun, 18 Feb 2007 23:40:49 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/02/18/productivity-tools-winsnap/ WinSnap is a great little application that can replace regular Windows screen captures. Previously mentioned FastStone Capture is great for scrolling screen captures like Web pages in browsers, but WinSnap is great for regular CTRL+Prnt Scrn replacement. It can be configured to automatically modify the image border to rounded corners or PhotoShop-style shadows.  This is particularly useful for us bloggers who like to capture images and post them to our blogs. Older versions are free (for personal, educational and non-commercial use) and as a bonus they have a portable version, so this application needs to be added to my list of essential portable applications. The free version is available here.

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/productivity-tools-winsnap/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/index-card-fun/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/index-card-fun/#comments Fri, 16 Feb 2007 04:12:59 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/02/15/index-card-fun/ Indexed is a site where the owner, Jessica Hagy, sketches diagrams of arbitrary ideas onto index cards to “make fun of some things and sense of others”. Great sense of humor!

It’s interesting from an SEO perspective because the site does not have much indexable content, but it has original content in the form of images. It’s the originality through creativity and simplicity that attracts users and that is more valuable than SEO.

]]> http://www.davinciplanet.com/index-card-fun/feed/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/wordpress-21/ http://www.davinciplanet.com/wordpress-21/#comments Mon, 12 Feb 2007 03:32:46 +0000 Da Vinci http://www.davinciplanet.com/2007/02/11/wordpress-21/ I upgraded to WordPress 2.1 today, mostly motivated by the editor updates. The upgrade itself was painless and all of the plugins seem to be working fine. The only problem was that embedded YouTube videos didn’t work. This was a good opportunity to test the new editor and I was able to fix the videos by getting the embed code from YouTube and replacing the code in the posts using the new “code” view of the editor. The new editor is a bit better than the old one, but I like the improved image handling. The autosave is also great. Here are some of the key features

Have fun upgrading!

If you are used to using command line tools for Copy & Paste, i.e. CTRL+C to copy and CTRL+V to paste then this little tool is a gem: You simply copy as usual using CTRL+C, but instead of using the CTRL+V hot-key to paste, you use the WINDOWS+V hot-key. (The WINDOWS key is the key with the Windows logo to the left of the [most-left] ALT key). PureText can be configured to use another hot-key combination, but the default makes sense and works for me.

PureText - plain text copy and paste app.

Typorganism is a Series of Communication Experiments exploring Computational Interaction Design and Interactive Kynetic Typography based on the Metaphorical Notion of Typography, Type is a Lifeform,…

The idea was to give keywords more importance in title tags by placing them first, e.g. a page formerly titled “Da Vinci Planet ›› Blog Archive ›› Essential Portable Apps” is now titled “Essential Portable Apps | Da Vinci Planet“. Google’s search results pages have since updated and are now showing the “SEO friendly” page titles. The results are somewhat surprising!

For the search term “essential portable apps”

Before: Positioned 2nd of about 1,370,000 results

Now: Positioned 2nd of about 1,390,000 results

Result: Position unchanged

For the search term “remove popcorn”

Before: Positioned 3rd of about 1,140,000 results

Now: Positioned 5th of about 1,260,000 results

Result: Position down from 3rd to 5th

For the search term “Top Web Analytics Tools”

Before: Positioned 94th of about 18,100,000 results

Now: Positioned 280th of about 23,400,000 results

Result: Position down from 94th to 280th! Total indexed Web pages increased by about 30%.

Conclusion

My position went down for two of the three search terms. Especially the last one, from 94th to 280th! Not that 94th was any good to start with: ) The number of pages that Google has indexed on the Web has increased for all three search terms - as one would expect - and that may have an effect. It’s possible that my page rankings were affected simply because Google detected that the pages were modified. I’ve heard that old is good when it comes to search engines. If that is true then it’s possible their rankings will improve over time. For now I’ll hope so and I will be checking from time to time how they are doing. Either way I’m sticking with the new title format because it looks better. Blissful ignorance?

Add your RSS feed to the Google Toolbar

1. Install the Google Toolbar if you don’t have it.
2. Browse to your site or the site that’s feed you would like to add.
3. Right-click in any textbox on the Web page and click on Generate Custom Search…



4. Click on Add in the Google Toolbar Custom Button Generator window. Click on OK to accept.





Add your RSS feed to the Google Toolbar

5. Click on Options in your Google Toolbar Settings.



6. Select the Buttons tab. You should see your button in the Custom Buttons list.
   Highlight your button by clicking on it and click on Edit



7. Click on the Use the advanced editor… hyperlink. This opens the Google Toolbar Custom Button Editor page in your browser.



8. Add your feed's URL in the <feed> and </feed> tags:
   http://feeds.feedburner.com/DaVinciPlanet
   The refresh-interval is in seconds and specifies how frequently the feed should be reloaded.



9. Before hitting the Save button, copy the entire XML text in the textbox and paste it into Notepad. This is needed if you want to submit your button to the Google Toolbar Gallery.
10. Hit the Save to Google Toolbar… button.
11. Your RSS feeds are now displayed when you hit the down-arrow next to your icon.





Submit your button to the Google Toolbar Gallery

12. Save the button XML that you copied into notepad into a file on your Web site, e.g. http://www.davinciplanet.com/google_toolbar.xml
13. Submit your button to the Google Toolbar Gallery.
14. In addition you can also add a link or button on your site to give users an easy way to add your site to their Google Toolbar by linking to:

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://www.davinciplanet.com/google_toolbar.xml

DiskAnalyzer Professional is a disk space analysis and cleaning software. It helps you search, monitor and clean oldest files, big size files, duplicate files, zero size files, graphics files, video files, compressed files, temporary and junk files from PC.

Besides the typical productivity type software that they give away daily, they also have a game giveaway of the day and they recently released a freeware library. I find it best to subscribe to their RSS feeds to not miss that free app opportunity.

As a side note, their site is WordPress driven and a good example of how traditional sites can be more effective when published in blog style.

One tip/plugin that I think is very useful is the SEO Title Tag. WordPress, by default, puts the blog’s name in front of every page title. Search engines typically display page titles in search results so you need to have an appropriate page title and normally your post title is more appropriate. This plugin makes it easy to create SEO friendly page titles. I activated the plugin today and will post an update when the updates are reflected in Google.

These two sites have good SEO suggestions and plugin recommendations for WordPress sites:

• Blog optimization: 10 SEO tips
• Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Users concerned about the flexibility of the service like using email clients (e.g. Outlook & Thunderbird) need not be concerned because Google isn’t evil and they support it. Another concern has been the support of SPF records to prevent spam using your domain, but again, Google isn’t evil and so they support it:

• Configuring Outlook 2003
• Configuring Thunderbird 1.5
• Configuring SPF records

Besides Gmail functionality for your domain, Google offers other services like Google Talk and Google Calendar for your domain. Knowing Google, I am certain that they will soon include Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Desktop, Search etc. in the service.

Now, of course, Microsoft offers a similar service called Windows Live Custom Domains. In many ways they are a step ahead, like hosting Web sites for free (called Windows Office Live), however, I recently received and email from them saying that they were coming out of beta and so I’m not sure about the freeness going forward.

The one big issue with all of this, of course, is that Google (and competitors) have me nailed down because they can:

• Read my email;
• Know which sites and pages I visit (Google toolbar);
• Know who comes to my site (Google Analytics);
• Index all my documents (Google Desktop);
• Know what I search for (Google.com); and
• Kind of verify all of the above and do something addtional that I can’t even think of using Adsense and Adwords.

This guy has a great idea on how to handle this problem and if Google really doesn’t want to be evil then they should seriously consider it! It’s like SOX for Privacy (not the Red or the White ones!!)

Makes me want to like Microsoft again!

Technically all you need to do is add a few Registry keys, but most people hate to do that so here’s what I’d suggest:

For Windows XP:
Download and install TweakUI, a Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP application. Then from the Control Panel, start Tweak UI and update your view source editor under Internet Explorer | View Source.

For Windows 2000:
First you have to ask yourself why you are still on Win2K?! (oh, right, thanks to the corporate build I am too). Unfortunately the Tweak UI for Win2K isn’t as good and, besides, it’s really hard to find (but if you’re curious it’s here). To change your default view source editor in Windows 2000 you do need to create the needed Registry entries. What you need to do is to create a file called whatever.reg and then to copy the following text into that file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\View Source Editor]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\View Source Editor\Editor Name]
@=”D:\\Portable\\NotePad++\\notepad++.exe”

Note: Edit the last line to point to the editor of your choice (notice that you need double backslashes in the path)

Then double-click on the whatever.reg file and accept the “Are you sure” warning.

Alternatively you can manually create the above registry keys. Or upgrade to XP.

• Added tabbed browsing. It is more elegant than Firefox, has a preview tab “(Quick Tabs”) and an easier way to open a new tab.
• Collapsed menu bars. This opens a lot more of the browser window.
• Add-ons, similar to Firefox extensions. E.g. IESpell enables spell checking in forms (Firefox 2.0 does this natively)
• RSS feed handling, similar to Firefox.

Overall I think the that collapsed menu bars makes IE7 more elegant than Firefox and while I think Firefox will remain strong due to the Linux community, IE will retain and regain many users.

There are a few Web sites that offer tools for download to remove popcorn.net, but how can you trust them? The best advice I found (and trusted) was here.

However, you can create your own VMware Windows virtual appliance or live CD if you had a windows installation CD. You really need a fresh Windows installation CD (with an unused license) to create a legal Windows VMware virtual appliance. However, you can legally create a Windows live CD from your original Windows installation CD using BartPE. But wait, you can run a live CD virtual appliance so then you do have a way to get a free WinXP virtual appliance!

Bart’s Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) is a hack of the Microsoft Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE). Windows PE is only available to OEM users and BartPE’s creator was kind enough to make a (legal and more flexible) version that we all can use. Bart’s PE Builder helps you build a “BartPE” bootable Windows CD-Rom or DVD from the original Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 installation/setup CD, with a complete Win32 environment with network support.

To find out if an application is portable can be tricky and often an application may be promoted as portable but you need to find the right download because it’s default design isn’t. Typically a zip download (vs. exe) will be the portable one. I will try to indicate the portable version with each of the recommendations. All of the applications listed are free.

TrueCrypt
Free Open-Source Disk Encryption Software. TrueCrypt creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk. Essential software even for non-portable use. Read the traveller mode documentation to understand it’s portability. If you are saving personal information to a USB drive, this is a must.

Firefox
Mozilla Firefox - Portable Edition is a true portable application: it leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, including all your bookmarks and extensions.

KeePass Password Safe
Keepass is the best password manager around and it’s free, open source, lightweight and extremely secure.

ClamWin Antivirus
I have previously posted about ClamWin antivirus. ClamWin Portable is the portable version of the application.

portaPuTTY SSH Client
PuTTY is the free SSH client that we all love. “portaPuTTY is a hacked version of PuTTY that stores all its information in files, not in the registry.”

GreatNews RSS Reader
Lean, clean and fast RSS reader.

µTorrent
A lightweight, yet full featured BitTorrent client.

Gaim Portable
The portable version of the popular IM client that supports AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber and Sametime (yes, even Sametime! ;)).

DeepBurner
CD and DVD burning application. To run DeepBurner Free Portable from your Flash drive, download it and then simply unzip onto your USB memory drive and run DeepBurner.exe.

VLC Media Player
A free, portable media player. Media players could be a p.i.t.a. so having it portable is a huge bonus.

FastStone Capture
FastStone Capture is a powerful, flexible and intuitive screen-capture utility. Forget SnagIt, this is free, clean and portable!

NotePad++
Notepad++ is a free source code editor. It’s a great replacement for the default Notepad.

Nvu Web Authoring
Nvu is an easy to use Frontpage or DreamWeaver like application. Nvu Portable is just that.

FileZilla
FileZilla Portable is a portable FTP client so you can take your server list and settings with you.

7-Zip
Compression software for those situations where you don’t have access to WinZip.

HijackThis
A browser homepage hijackers detector and remover. An unpolished, but very powerful spyware detection app.

PStart
PStart is a tray tool to start user defined applications, especially for portable applications.

XAMPP Lite
XAMPP is an integrated server package of Apache, mySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin (the AMPP in XAMPP) that all run from a removable drive. You can even make WorPress portable using XAMPP.

While not really a portable application, SyncBack deservers a special mention. SyncBack is a really good backup utility and is very useful for synching USB drives with local hard disks. It is not a freeware application, but they offer older versions (still very good) for free.

• Portals; e.g. Drupal, Mambo, Joomla
• Blogs; e.g. Serendipity and of course WordPress
• eCommerce, Forums, Image Galleries, etc..

The administrator username and password is given for every system and each system is deleted and re-installed every two hours. This allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here without fear of breaking anything.

OpenSourceCMS has a timer on the home page that counts down from two hours. Every two hours the demo sites shut down and reset to fresh installs. During that time you have complete administrator access to test the applications. So, for instance, if you were interested to learn about Drupal (because, wow, the Rachael Ray Show is built on Drupal!), then instead of downloading and installing it yourself you simply try it out on-line with admin access.

Now if only we could download OpenSourceCMS onto a USB drive as a portable app

OpenSourceCMS

There are two main methods how Web analytic tools work: log analysis and client side tracking. From experience I can say that client side tracking is by far the best. There are very few benefits of log analysis. Here’s a list of prominent Web analytics tools.

Omniture
Provides real-time measurement and monitoring of a site’s key performance indicators via client side tracking.

Google Analytics
Free (for most) client side tracking with a easy to use user interface.

WebTrends
They have always been the leader, but it seems they got hung on log analyis and while they now offer both client side tracking and log analysis solutions they have fallen behind.

NetTracker
They positioned themselves against Webtrends and also got caught in the middle between Omniture and Google Analytics with not much room. Log based and tracking pixel solutions available.

WebSideStory
Omniture’s closest competitor. Great enterprise solution, but they don’t seem to have the pasion that Omniture has for their business.

The Webalizer
Free log based analysis that’s been around for a while and many hosting providers offer Webalizer with their hosting solutions.

Nielsen//Netratings
Nielsen have the name, but they didn’t have a product so they bought RedSheriff. Enterprise solution that falls short of Omniture and WebSideStory.

Opentracker
Opentracker is tracking pixel based. Not free, but inexspensinve. Has interesting live demo.

OneStat
Free stat counter.

DeepMetrix LiveSTATS
Recently purchased by Microsoft. Will most probably be offered free as a Google Analytics alternative. More to come!

ClickTracks
ClickTracks Appetizer - software, log based - is available for free.

Coremetrics
Has a partnership with IBM and offers an analytics olution tailored for WebSphere Commerce customers.

AWStats
Free, open source. An alternative to Webalizer.

Clickstream
Log based and tracking pixel solutions available, however, not on an ASP model so you host your own analysis software.

Other Web analytics solutions:
eVisit Analyst
IndexTools
SageMetrics
WebtraffIQ
MyBlogLog

1. Of course you first need to have the VMware Player installed. (See previous post for more info)
2. Download the OS Integrated Live CD Player, available as a BitTorrent download from the VMware directory. If you don’t have a BitTorrent client try µTorrent, a portable BitTorrent client.
3. Read the README.txt. For Windows it goes something like this:

There is no configuration script for Windows 2000/XP, so it will need to be configured manually.

From Windows Explorer, Click “Tools” -> “Folder Options”. Select the “File Types” tab and scroll down the list looking for the type with extension ISO (If it is not there, you will need to make one by clicking “New”). Highlight the ISO type and Click “Advanced”. Click “New” and under “Action:” give it a name like “Boot with VMware”. Under “Application used to perform action:”, give the filename with path to the ISOPLAYER.BAT script, followed by and switches you want and finally “%1″. It is important that the %1 be enclosed in quotation marks. Also make sure to enclose in quotes any filename that inclused spaces.

For example, you might type something like this:
“C:\isoplayer\isoplayer.bat” /d /vmware:”C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player\vmplayer.exe” “%1″

After this, click “Ok”.

So it really is easy to set up even though it doesn’t use an installation wizard. Once setup you can download and launch live CDs within a virtual machine without burning CDs and without installing anything!

If you ever want to test an operating system or an application, but you are hesitant to install it on your own computer or server, this is an excellent virtualization option. There are, of course, many torrent downloads available - both good and bad. Other uses of virtual appliances include testing of software, like Windows Vista, IE7 or Microsoft Expression Web - all those beta applications that you really want to try out, but don’t want install on your computer just yet.

Wink is a search engine that integrates tag results from multiple sources such as del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo MyWeb (and we’re adding more). It gives you the freshest information on the web by serving up the most relevant tagged links for your search. We crawl and index tags from all over the web, and serve them up with web results, for a combination of freshness and accuracy. We also include other user-contributed content, such as answers from Wikipedia that you’ll find under the Wink Answers tag, which is added by people like you. We also provide Google search, because tag coverage is still thin in some areas, and while tag results are really interesting, we know what you want sometimes is best found on Google.

Wink doesn’t seem to be publicized as much as most, yet it has substantial user base. So I decided to put it to the test by comparing Wink with Digg using a few search terms, e.g. “seo wordpress”. Digg by default sorts by recency, but even when sorting by most diggs Wink still had better results (i.t.o. quality of links). I liked it enough to create my own profile

Wink
Wink Blog
102 resources on Social Bookmarking Sites - listable.com
55 Social Bookmarking Sites to Promote Your Blog Articles - webloghits.com

Not serious
If you want to simply create a blog for free and do not care too much about domain names and getting email accounts for your domain, then sign up with one of the many free services, e.g:

• Blogger
• WordPress
• Windows Live Spaces
• LiveJournal
• Yahoo! 360
• Xanga

Maybe serious
If you think that you are serious enough that you would purchase a domain name and pay a few dollars a month for hosting, but want to test the waters first then I suggest that you first sign up with wordpress.com. You will get a free blog that will live under myname.wordpress.com, where the “myname” part will be replaced by the username you choose. Then choose a theme, create some posts and play around with it to get familiar. The reason I suggest using WordPress is because I recommend WordPress for the “Serious” users and so it will give you chance to familiarize yourself with WordPress Administration.

Serious
Primarily if you want to use your own domain name and add custom features like Web analytics code and sell adds. To set up a blog of this nature requires the use of several services and will cost about $50/year. Google will become your best friend. Here’s what you need to do:

• Configure WordPress on godaddy.com
• Get a Google Analytics account
• Create Google Adsense account

Happy Blogging!

Alexaholic blends Alexa website traffic graphs with a lightweight ajax-enhanced interface to satisfy hard-core Alexa traffic chart junkies – aka Alexaholics.

Webmasters, SEO/SEM specialists, and domain owners can compare and measure website statistics for up to five domains at once, switch traffic chart types and ranges without page loads, and generate report pages that are easily bookmarked and shared.

Not surprisingly though, Alexaholic reports that Yahoo gets about three times as much traffic as Google (click on page views tab).

1. Create a hosting account
To start off you will need to sign up for a hosting account and choose a domain name for your blog. Go to the Hosting Plans page on the Go Daddy site. The Economy Plan is usually suitable and currently costs $3.59/month for 12 month. You need to choose between Linux and Windows hosting solutions and I’d recommend Linux because it works nicer with WordPress (particularly permalinks). You typically do not need any of the optional services that they offer, but you may consider the Private domain registration ($4.99 per year) to hide your personal info from public whois. You can add a domain name for $1.99 (+ $0.25 ICANN fee). The total charge, for 1 year, will be around $50.32. That will be your only cost for this setup. Once you have paid you may have to wait a few of hours for your hosting set up to complete.

2. Install WordPress
Next you need to install WordPress into your site. To do this, browse to godaddy.com, log in to your account and then go to Hosting & Servers and go to My Hosting Plans. Select Open next to the hosting account that you would like to add WorPress. In the Hosting Manager look for click on Value Applications, locate WordPress and click on install. You need to enter basic WordPress administration info, submit, wait a couple of minutes and it’s installed. Besides WordPress, you will also see many other applications that are readily available, including Coppermine image gallery, SiteBar, AdvancedPoll and PmWiki wiki.

After installing WordPress, Go Daddy will show a link to launch the application. By default WordPress will be installed into the /wordpress folder. To change that could be tricky, but you could do it by using an FTP client to connect to your site (create an FTP account by going to Manage FTP Users in the Host Manager) and renaming the wordpress folder to the name of your choice, then you need to browse to the admin page in the new folder (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/new_wordpress_folder/wp-admin/index.php) and update the path info in the Options | General section. If you want to run WordPress as your root application, you will need to move the files to your root folder - possibly by downloading and then re-uploading the files to root (make sure you know what you’re doing!).

3. Familiarize yourself with WordPress
This is where the fun starts! After you get WordPress working you need to familiarize yourself with the Web application by checking out the admin tool and reading the documentation. You will want to create a theme or choose one from the many available on-line (mostly free) and enhance it by installing plugins and adding Web analytics, RSS feeds, etc..

4. Useful resources

Themes:
WordPress Codex
Emily Robnins, How to blog - a comprehensive list of themes.

Plugins:
WordPress Codex

There are two ways to add the tracking code to your WordPress blog: 1) by installing a plug-in and 2) by editing the theme source pages directly.

Install a Google Analytics plug-in.
There are a number of plug-ins available for free and they are mostly similar and very easy to use, including:

• Google Analyticator
• Boakes Google Analytics Plugin for Wordpress
• Semiologic Google analytics plugin for WordPress
• OraTransplant - Ultimate Google Analytics plugin for WordPress

Edit your WordPress pages directly.
This is probably the no so smart option, but since I did it I might as well mention it. You will need to edit the source of your theme pages. Login to your WordPress admin tool, select the Presentation tab and then Theme Editor. The Header (header.php) or Footer (footer.php) is normally the best place to insert your Google Analytics code, but make sure that you insert it after the <body> tag in the Header or before the </body> tag in the Footer, depending on which file you inserted the code. After saving the file, preview your blog and view the page source to verify that the tracking code has been inserted. Google Analytics can can lag a few hours to show traffic.

Sudoku Portable is a an addictive puzzle game originally created in France over 100 years ago. It features a 9×9 grid containing 9 3×3 grids. Within this you arrange the numbers 1 through 9. But, each number can only appear once in each of the 9 3×3 grids. And it can only appear once in each row and on each column. It’s a simple concept, but it can get addictive quickly.

Sudoku Portable - portableapps.com

The TrueCrypt file can be emailed, backed up and FTP’ed and remain secure because of the strong encryption. It can also be run from a USB flash drive. The virtual disks can be mounted on any operating system.

Once a volume is mounted, files that are written to the virtual disk are encrypted on the fly.  Performance is excellent and you hardly notice anything - except if you choose some ridiculous encryption algorithm.

You can create almost any size virtual drive and chose from most popular file systems, e.g. FAT32 and NTFS.

Make sure to save your password:  There is no way to recover a lost password!

• Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.
• Encrypts an entire hard disk partition or a device.
• Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.

It’s very simple:

1. Download and install TrueCrypt: http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads.php
2. Start the application
3. Click on Create Volume
4. Select a location and file name for the virtual drive. The virtual drive is saved as one big encrypted file (or a whole disk)
5. Choose an encryption algorithm
6. Choose the virtual drive size
7. Choose a password
8. Select the file that you just created and choose a drive letter on which to mount it
9. Click on Mount and enter password

The drive is available to you and anyone else connected to the computer for as long as it is mounted. See the Beginner’s Tutorial for more information.

The Sysinternals web site provides you with advanced utilities, technical information, and source code related to Windows internals that you won’t find anywhere else.

Some of my favorite utilities are:

• BlueScreen - A “blue screen of death” screensaver : )
• Junction - Symbolic links for Windows
• Du - Disk usage by directory
• MoveFile -  Schedule file rename and delete commands for the next reboot
• Process Explorer - Task Manager on steriods