Yea I know it’s cheesy but what the hell it’s Christmas. Having cheap chaved up snowflakes on the website will do it no favors but tis the season to be jolly. Now all I got to do is get some Christmas decorations up in the flat. I might even get some tinsel for my monitor in the office or a nice background.
Well since the move over to Wordpress one of the biggest things I wanted to ensure I do is not lose all my posts from my old Blogger site. One of the cool things about Wordpress is that it has an import function which allows you to pull your Blogger posts in Wordpress though you still need to assign categories to them. This is something I thought I would not look forward to but actually looking over some of the ol’ post is gonna be fun methinks.
Anyway feel free to start looking at them starting from May 2006 backwards.
Just a quick note to say I’ve found a very useful plug-in that some bloggers may find useful as well. I was searching for a plug-in for Firefox that allows me to blog on the fly when I see a page that I find interesting. I came across the Performancing plug-in and it seems to work o.k so far. I’m actually using it right now, so if this post works out alright I’l be most pleased.
I feel Wordpress is fast becoming the leader behind blogging software. This site itself is built on the Wordpress platform and performs well on a variety of areas that are important for me; Usability, Customisability, and Search engine friendliness. These are the three key areas to any web publishing application in my personal opinion. On the subject of search engine friendliness Google has a webmaster area that enables you to submit a sitemap, amongst other interesting tools. I’m not going to go in to why you should submit a sitemap and indeed have a Google account other than the fact Google say that Webmatser Tools “offer webmasters an easy way to make their sites more Google-friendly” and provides “Google’s view of your site, and diagnosing potential problems.”
So we have a great publishing platform and a great tool from Google to ensure they are aware of you new posts and overall content. However my ideal solution would be to combine these two elements together; I wasn’t alone in my thoughts. Arne Brachhold not only had the same idea earlier but also has built a terrific plug in. It works beautifully and I fully recommend it. Installation is very easy and the way it works is great.
Once you have registered and verified your site with Google and installed the plug-in with the correct write permissions you can continue blogging in the normal way. Each time you post the plug-in recreates the XML sitemap, adding your new post URL to the site map to. It then pings Google to inform them to collect the XML Sitemap.
It’s simple, pretty fast and a new version is in BETA so I look forward to seeing that.
Just a quick note to say I’ve now added Google Analytics to the sites statistics. That means now the site is being tracked by logs, Stat Counter, Crazy Egg and Performancing.
I think I’ve pretty much got all the free stats I need…but if there is some more useful ones please do get in touch.
This is a update from a previous post called CrazyEgg - I’m testing it now. This is just a quick post to say you can have a look at where people are clicking on Freshhome. If you click through on the picture on the left you’ll see that the article title, mySpace and Login are key areas of the website.
These results are only after one day and then will reset, so I’m going to extend it, to what? I don’t know. Anyway it makes some pretty colours and looks very cool.
I’ve just setup CrazyEgg on my site to see what information it gives. What is CrazyEgg? You might be asking. Simply put by CrazyEgg, the service provides “…a clear picture of where your visitors are clicking and enhance your site’s results.” How does it do this? Well it provides heat maps that are overlaid on your site as well as a list of raw data.
Why am I doing this? Well I’m not looking to push Freshhome in to the usability area. Freshhome is a very selfish site in terms of design. However I think this maybe useful for business to understand their users / customers. The introductory level is free and allows you to track 5000 visitors a month over four pages. For further price details click here.
I have now added two new pages called mySpace and Links. I haven’t added everyone in the friends list yet so if I haven’t put you on it’s not becuase I have forgotten you. It’s because I don’t know you web address. Please do get in touch.
