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Posts Tagged ‘Fear’

Something I’m learning a lot about (and I think I have a handle on it) is analytics. What the numbers mean, how they can be used wisely as time rolls on and are they any good for a blog.

I will start out by saying I’m a numbers freak. I love watching my Woopra live stats through the day or getting my daily email feed from Google showing the visits and hits. Sure I don’t get a lot of traffic, but it’s traffic and it’s exciting to see and watch what people are doing.

So, what can I do with these numbers?

(Note: These stats are from Woopra and captured using Jing)

Screen Resolution

One of the important stats you can get is the screen resolution of your regular visitors. Why is this important?

Well, look at the image above. As you can see, only 36 people visit my site using 800×600 – which means that I can comfortably design the layout for 960px wide without fear of really screwin’ with the numbers. No offense you little resolution people.

This helps to cater your site to your majority resolution holders. Which is good..

Browsers

As the browser wars rage on this is an important stat to watch. Many people know that Internet Explorer (exploder) doesn’t like some CSS or other layout styles. FireFox is usually the browser to use, but many people still use IE. For unknown reasons.

So, watching this stat will help you to know what lengths you need to go through to style your site well. As you can see, FireFox leads the pack. IE 7 follows far behind trailed by the horrid IE6 (why don’t you people upgrade?!). Apple’s Safari is low numbers … you can take all these stats and decide what you want to do. Style for IE6 (no PNG, CSS fix galore) or let them drown? Safari will display the site fine – if IE7 does so will Safari (Apple and Microsoft are good friends, see?).

OS Platform

While not as important design wise, knowing who your visitors are really does help. If you’re serious about your blog, you’ll want to know what kind of visitors you have. As you can see, I have a lot of Window’s visitors. I don’t have very many Fedora, so I probably won’t post many articles or talk about Fedora much (hey, I don’t even use it!). I do have a small group of Mac users rolling in, so I can confidently do something for them – however if most of my users are Window’s based than it is reasonable to think they should be my target audience.

Keywords & Quiries

Woopra also gives you stats like what keywords were used in searching for your site and what queries where used. I can’t remember if Google Analytics does that also – but I’m sure they do since they do adword sales.

According to this stat, Photoshop is the top keyword for my site – so if I want to drive more traffic I’d want to do some articles about Photoshop such as tutorials or free brushes and actins. ‘nen’ is the next keyword – which I have no clue what that  means.

Other ENGLISH words that are top are: tutorial, light, desktop, wallpaper. So you can start understanding how this will aid you in sculpting your content

Here you see the queries – what phrases are people searching. ‘Kill them with kindness’ is the top list – which surprised me in this day. Again, you see some foreign text (my blog is translated in a lot of languages) and other Photoshop terms.

Take these with the keywords and you can have a pretty good idea what kind of people browse my site. Mostly it seems people looking for Photoshop  tutorials. So, theoretically I should start making my own tutorials.

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So, are you see some of these stats do play on what your blog does. Unless it’s just a blog for blogging sake (like my site here) than you really need to look at your current demographic and try and mold your site.

Don’t drop looking at stats. These can be and should be as important as the design and the content of your site. It will help you become more successful in the saturated blog industry because you’ll be able to find your nitch easier and garner to more of your current ‘fan base’.

Good luck and happy blogging.

I’ve been having a rough time internally with some struggles. Doubt, fear and anger are among those that I wish I could ignore. Nightmares have fed two of these – and things in life fueled the other.

It’s hard to be a happy Christian when the world is consistently pounding on you.

My good buddy Pete made a statement, which I will paraphrase for you.

God is in control and it’s His plan we follow. We’re like a graphic novel, and you never know what’s on the next page.

Well said Pete.

While it doesn’t take away the fears and anger and doubt – it does me well to remember that no matter what, God is in control. His plan is better than anything I could come up with. I just need to trust.

The folks at WordPress have released the Official 2.6, which is called ‘Tyner’ after some jazz pianist. Which, I hate jazz – but I’ll let them go on their personal opinions.

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/

Anyway, it was with fear and trembling that I hit "upgrade" on my web site. I secretly upgraded the Studio  646 site first since I get a grand total of no hits so if it crashed, burned and the ashes blew to the four corners of the earth never to be seen again – I don’t think anyone would have noticed.

However, that didn’t happen. It worked perfectly fine and got everything upgraded. It’s looking like 2.6 is a success.

What makes me laugh though is how people are complaining here and there about how WordPress upgrades "way too often", which really comes down to twice a year. And really, they’re just whining because they’re too lazy to upgrade their web sites and make a few adjustments when things don’t work the way they want it to. These are probably also the same people who still run Windows 3.1, use a horse and buggy (which I admit would save gas) and believe that women should only cook, clean and tend to the children.

I digress.

WordPress 2.6 rolls out a few nice features, such as being able to test your template before you go live. I formally did this with a plugin called "Theme Test Drive" which worked well.

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

So yeah, looking good thus far. Praise God for that!

… to a family near you.

Carolyn is pregnant! HUZZAH!

We have been sitting on this news for a while (over a month) until she has a doctor confirm it without a doubt: there is a baby in there.

Then, she did this neat little booklet and sent it to her mom to tell her mom, and we had to sit on the news LONGER because someone didn’t get the mail till today! SO now, I can officially announce it to the world:

We’re going to have another child!

Stop groaning! It won’t be that bad!

She is due in mid-December. So yes, it will be a Christmas-esque baby. We feel bad for him/her. But, we’re glad there is going to be a baby.

So, please pray for us. I personally know a few families who have had miscarriages the past few months and so the fear of it happening to us as well is there. So please pray for a healthy baby and healthy mommy!

It was a general fear for the new WordPress admin to look .. well, butt ugly. The color scheme was compeletly different, as was the general layout of the sections. While it wasn’t HORRIFIC it was pretty drab. Bright and .. well, made my eyes burn.

Jeffro2pt0 posted over on Weblog Tools Collection about the new admin and a feature that they decided to add:

Ryan started us off by announcing that WordPress 2.5 will feature two different color schemes. One color scheme will be called Classic while the other will be Fresh. Fresh will feature the newly redesigned color scheme while Classic will contain darker shades of blue and gray. Now, the only decision is whether to have Classic or Fresh be the default color scheme. So far, it looks like Fresh is winning the race. >> Read the whole article

I like this idea much better than having to dig like mad to figure out how to change things back to the tried and true admin feel. What would be nice is if they gave the admin the ability to choose which color scheme to use at installation rather than defaulting to one or the other. Granted you can change this in the admin area anyway, but it would be a nice added feature – and I assume not too difficult to throw in. But, I’m not a programmer so who am I to say!?

Also I will note that I don’t even use the basic admin for WordPress. I use ‘Tiger Administration‘ which is so much nicer, in my opinion. But that’s my opinion, which may not amount to much in the greater scheme of things!