The Blarg announced his number of visits a while back and I thought I’d take a look at some of my stats. I’ve been using Google Analytics for a while and I’ve got data back to Sept 2006. I started my blog in Oct 2005, but traffic would have been negligible that first year, maybe add 5% onto these numbers. So where do I stand?
- Unique Visitors: 47,295
- Visits: 61,400
- Pageviews: 102,244
Not bad. My Wordpress plugins make up the majority of my traffic, about 55% of the page views. A lot of those are single visit bounces, probably because I don’t have my sidebar up on individual pages; might be a good thing to change. A couple other interesting factoids:
- About 98% of visitors have a screen resolution larger than 800×600
- 58.5% were using Firefox vs 31% for IE
I’ve been wanting to do a redesign and it might be safe to finally push out towards 900-1000 pixel wide layouts. Still have to take into account that people don’t run their browsers maximized all the time.
Tagged with: google, traffic
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Google has their GrandCentral service in beta right now and I signed up to find out more about it. GrandCentral is a telephony service that let’s you route all your phone calls coming in and going out through a single phone number. Google provides you with a phone number and you link your phone numbers like cell, home and work to it. So what does GrandCentral actually do?
First off it let’s people call you at a single number. When your GrandCentral number gets called, all the numbers you link to it ring (or however you configure it). That makes giving out your number easier since someone will be able to get a hold of you from a single number. This is also nice if you have numbers that can’t be ported like home and work, just give out your Grand Central number. You can initiate calls from your browser: select the person you want to call and which of your phones you want to use. You get a call from your GrandCentral number, you pick up and then it calls whoever you chose.
At home and don’t want to use cell minutes? Answer your home phone. There is also the possibility of putting your Grand Central number in your “Fave 5″ if your cell provider offers that service. Another cool feature is being able to switch between your phones without interrupting calls. Just hit *, your other phones will ring, answer the phone you want to transfer to and hang up the other one. Could be useful if you are having a conversation on your cell and arrive home or you have to leave and want to seamlessly switch to your cell.
There’s a few other cool features. You can screen calls like you could with old school answering machines: you hit 3 to pick up and listen as the caller leaves a message and then hit * to jump in. You can record conversations (both parties get notified) and forward or playback messages from your browser or by calling your Grand Central number.
The system is pretty customizable too. You can set how callers get screened based on if they are unknown or if they are in your address book. Have unknown callers go straight to voice mail and let them leave a message, but let your friends get right through. You can create groups and decide which phones ring for each one. You can record personalized greetings or rings for specific people and groups; friends could get a casual greeting, but business contacts get a more formal greeting.
Overall I think GrandCentral is a great idea if you actually need it. If you’ve just got a cell phone it might not be too useful. If you are juggling a cell, home and work it could be a pretty cool tool to have. Everything is free right now, but I think the plan is to charge for outgoing calls which might affect how appealing it is for personal use.
Blogger Invite
More Detailed Tour
Tagged with: google, phone
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I’ve been a faithful user of Gmail for a little over 2 years now and one of the things I never really used was the built-in chat since most people use AIM to chat. The Gmail team released a new feature today that allows you to login to your AIM account and have your buddies show up in the “chat” list with your other Gmail contacts. I haven’t been much of a chatter for a while and I even went through today and purged my buddy list of over 50 screen names.
The integration with Gmail is a little primitive (as is Gmail’s chat), but it works great for the amount of chatting I do. The one feature that I would love to see is the ability to map AIM screen names to Gmail contacts so they don’t show up twice in the chat list. That would be uber-slick. If you use Gmail try it out, hit the options button on the bottom left of the chat list.
Tagged with: email, gmail, google
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I’ve made a post about Really Simple Syndication (RSS) in the past and alluded to it elsewhere, but I never really went into the details of the best way to adopt this very simple technology (no pun intended). In a nutshell RSS let’s subscribe to all your favorite blogs and websites and have all the posts and content show up in one easy to access place. I’ve got about 40 blogs and sites that I frequent, imagine how long it would take to go through and check everyday for new content; I sure don’t have that kind of time. That’s where RSS and Google Reader comes in.
I’m going to use Google Reader as a platform for this post but the post will still be helpful to those using a program that supports OPML. I’m a big fan of Gmail which led me to be a big fan of Google Reader. I’ve done all the work of compiling a list of feeds that includes all of our blogs and their comments; you get to reap the benefits. All you will have to do is create an account with Google (if you don’t have one) and then upload the XML file below.
- Save this XML file to your computer by right-clicking and hitting “Save As…”
- Create your Google Account here
- Log into Google Reader
- Click “Settings” in the top right
- Click the “Import/Export” tab
- Browse for the file you saved in Step 1 and hit Upload
- Go Back to Google Reader and browse everyone’s posts and comments
I tried to get everyone in there so if there’s someone missing let me know and I’ll update the file.
And if you want to add your friend’s blogs here’s how to get their comment feeds since they usually aren’t linked:
- Blogger: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default/
- Wordpress: http://blogurl/feeds/comments/default
Got other feeds for sites you like? Post em up and share with everyone else. One of my favorites is I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?, hit “Add Subscription” in Google Reader and paste in this link:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ICanHasCheezburger
Tagged with: google, rss
Posted under: Geek Stuff
In that past several weeks I’ve been moving up on the Google search results for several key searches. I’m now number 1 when searching for “geeky” and “weekly” and in a new surprise, 8th with “andrew” and “charlton”. Hopefully I’ll have content up soon where people will come across my work here without actually knowing my name or the name of the site.
Google search for geeky weekly
Google search for andrew charlton
Tagged with: google, search, traffic
Posted under: Geek Stuff
