analytics

Hey Folks,

If you’re like me and have a couple of sites and truly use the account snapshot page of google analytics you’re probably changing the listing size (Show Rows) selectbox and then clicking on the sort by Visits twice to see your sites sorted by the most visited to the least.

We’re talking about having to click on 4 buttons everytime you go to your analytics account snapshot page.

Well, there’s a way to change this – Just use the following URL everytime by adding it to your favorites, it automatically adds the GET data needed to sort your site listings by visits and also shows atleast 50 site results on that same page (Now you don’t have to click on any selectbox or link to view the aggregated report for your site

https://www.google.com/analytics/settings/?hl=en#sort=-VISITS&pagesize=50&page=1

BTW, want to truly increase your traffic ?

Now that you have property set up your analytics snapshot page – How about learning how to get more traffic to your website? I truly recommend this great guide for you.

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I have found out today that under my installation of PHP 5.3.0 on windows vista with WAMP – PHP just doesn’t want to report parse errors on my browser, even with error_reporting set to “on”. When parse errors occur PHP usually just prints out a blank white page without content or description of the errors. (The errors can still be fetched using your web server’s log or by using a PHP syntax check application)

After doing some google searches it looks like other people have had this problem too. the only fix I found for this was to use wamp and just upgrade php to version 5.3.1 (The latest version available at this time).

Upgrading / Modifying your PHP version is really simple with WAMP:

Left click on the WAMP icon in your system tray, click on PHP -> Version -> Get More…
WAMP’s upgrade page will pop up in your browser, just choose the latest php build or your current version (If you just want to reinstall) – open the downloaded file, install and you’re setup with a new version of PHP.

You might need to use the WAMP menu again to change the active version of  the PHP you’re using. everytime you change the php version with wamp’s menu’s it automatically edits all the INI files needed to run your webserver – like the php directory locaction in your httpd.conf (Apache webserver) file.

To change the active PHP version under wamp ->
Left click on the wamp icon in your system tray, click on PHP -> Version -> click on the version you want to be activated.

* The next time you execute WAMP it will remember your selection and will boot up with that version of php.

Resources :

New to PHP? start learning PHP with Robert Plank’s Easy PHP ebook.

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Creating content for the web

Most of the time I find myself doing things which were not planned or thought of in advance and that do not create general value for me or others.

As one whose main occupation is the creation process – I must define and understand the word “value” and it’s meaning to me, what gets left by me to this world – what is my creation?

I have found that there are 3 main patterns or levels of creating value which represents the overall usefulness of my creations to either my clients or to me – but more importantly – my clients.

The first level -

Value extraction:

In this level you mainly focus on procedures being made within your projects to create better resource usage on your systems or procedures.

This might involve creating computer algorithms that use less of the resources or even fire unskilful employees to reduce the company’s spend.

The second level -

Value copying / duplicating:

You have visited a competitor and noticed he has introduces a new feature or a service you do not offer, you then recreate and copy it to your company – this is value duplication.

The third level -

Value creation:

You focus on your clients requests and demands and create new features or services based on your clients. The value originated in this process is usually original.

Each level of value creation mentioned above creates value for your company or service but it has been shown that the amount of value created by the third level is the most useful and because it has direct client orientation – it will help you to disconnect from the never ending competition and create new features your competitors haven’t even started thinking of.

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creativity & ideas

Creativity and Ideas

sometimes we have an idea, in most cases we either forget it or write it on some piece of paper and then forget where we put it.
It’s a good practice to have a system for writing down your ideas and not loosing these peaks of creativity, everyone has ideas sometimes no matter how old you are or how creative you find yourself. I know of people who are buried under the same work for over 20 years and still have great ideas.

Manifesting an idea

While many of  our ideas get lost,  some do become a reality – in a times of crises we might find our selves with more free time and even have time to act on ideas we never thought we’ll have time to do. Making room and time for trying to make an idea to a reality is not that hard when you are truly organized and can define a time frame in which you are free to act upon your thoughts.

Ideas on the Internet

Because these days we’re spending a lot of time on the web, many ideas might be related to a website currently unavailable and you just thought of, or an Internet service you think you can really use – but it doesn’t exist.
these cases are truly happening nowadays with many web surfers who build new Internet solutions and services everyday – Even though existing for over 10 years the Internet has been the main item in a new age, the information age. It’s most likely that because everything is still new, your idea has yet to be published on the Internet, or has yet to be published on the Internet your way.

Building projects on the Internet

As a web application developer myself, there are  four main paths to creating a solution (or a web application / site) on the Internet:

1. Downloading a CMS, or a pre written script available for download freely – these includes free blog  systems based on word press, drupal, php-nuke and more.
2. Paying for a complete commercial CMS or web site building system in which the source is not freely available and you might even pay enough to make the seller end it’s sales of the specified code / system.
3. Outsourcing and having a complete human written solution / web application to yourself – there are many forums and websites on this issue on the net, you can go there and find that many people are outsourcing huge projects at cost of well over 10 thousand dollars.
4. Build it yourself – start from scratch, learn the basics and start day by day until you get all things done your way.

Choosing your way

Well,  start by looking at the four item list above and think (while knowing yourself best) what is the path in which you find yourself more attracted to, I personally chose the forth way for my projects even though I chose the first one for this blog. having to build your own project by yourself might take a lot of time, and if your not in the mood for creation, commitment and development work – you might not find yourself choosing this path.

Thanks for reading, tune in for more information about these paths in future posts.

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tagging

Introducing the TAG world:

 

In the past 3 years we have seen a dramatic change in many websites, almost every big website now incorporates a tagging system in which each piece of content is related to a couple or more “tags”.

Tags are more like a way of defining the scope of the written information in a which one can read these tags and understand most of the content’s (video/written) topic.

Because tagging has became so widespread we can see it nowadays in every social or content based site, if you own a website and have content in it – you may want to insert the related tags to that page.

In fact Tagging content is so important you can even see it take part in the world of SEO, under the header of HTML meta data – a great SEO tip is to add the meta data which defines the tagging for your website. I must say – that many CMS like the one which I’m using in my blog (word press), don’t really require you to define tags to a post you publish, but the option to do that exists and you can gain great SEO value out of spending a minute or two and defining the tags for the content you just spent your time writing.

Bad Tags, Good Tags:

Because tags have became so widely spread, they have been also misunderstood and misused. you might wander up many sites these days who either define more than 30 tags per page or define a lot of tags who do not relate to the content’s subject in any matter. this mainly happens because of two reasons:

1. People want to get traffic from certain search engine used keywords, therefor they are used and defined as tags in many content websites – even if the content barely related to these tags.

2. Over Tagging – the content just relates to too much information and to scroll down the content page or to watch that video takes about an hour, this makes it hard for only defining the content in a couple of words and makes many websites post huge lists of keywords about a related content page.

The Solution(s) – The right way to implement tagging on the web:

1. Even if it took you 2 hours to write / build your content – use only 5-10 keywords to define it.

2. Check now that all your web resources use the <Meta> keyword when displaying web pages with the right keywords intact, also check the syntax and spelling whithin the code you write.

3. Remove hot keywords which you want to create search engine traffic from content that does not relate to these keywords, instead create new content that does relate to these keywords and drive the traffic there. (this will also reduce the bounce rate - By taking the bouncing visitors to a page they can really find the content which was searched for)

4. Write your keywords on the web page itself and use links to make search engines understand they relate to pages on your website, if you use a CMS like word press you can enable the sidebar which displays your keywords.

5. Think and write on paper your keywords before even writing the post / content – That way your content will relate even more to these keywords and you’ll found yourself focusing more on these keywords while creating the content.

6. Do a web search for each tag and check what sites which are using this keyword are doing to integrate the keyword on the page, learn from the first results and you’ll learn from the best (watch your time and don’t spend too much on this, you might end up looking too much what other people are doing and less time creating content yourself  – this will hurt your production, I suggest time limitation on this task).

7. Use keyword analysis programs to fetch new keywords for your content, you can even check the search volume on these keywords in a tool such as the Google AdWords keywords tool (and you don’t need any google / AdWords account to commence your searches).

Resources:

1. writing keyword meta tags:

<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”your keywords,go here,separated by a comma,but not a space”>

2.  Google’s keyword tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal