Road TripI can’t remember the last time I posted a video. Time to fix that wrong 
Earlier in the month I posted this thread discussing Search Engine Optimization (SEO). That is all well and good but matters very little if you cannot quantify the results of your efforts. For this I strongly recommend Google Analytics.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to web masters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service, currently in use at around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites.
GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.
Integrated with AdWords, users can review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. These can also be monetized. By using GA, marketers can determine which ads are performing, and which are not, providing the information to optimise or cull campaigns.
In my opinion it is a very powerful collection of tools to be using. It will give feedback on many different aspects of your site. I mainly use it to track visitor origin, time on the site, most popular pages, bounce rate and traffic sources. I flung a few “technical” words just then so let me define them all 
Visitor Origin: The country of origin that the user who visited your site came from. GA displays these on a map, which is a really nice visual representation of the data.
Time On The Site: How long the visitor stayed on your site. GA also allows this to be broken down to individual pages on your site.
Popular Pages: The pages which your visitors are drawn to. GA displays this information by means of a percentage of all visits
Bounce Rate: It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-time-out occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session time-out of the analytics tracking software.
Traffic Sources: This indicates where visitors were before coming to your site. For example you may have a twitter account that directs people to your site via links. You could see how effective that is at getting people to visit your site.
Okay, so this sounds good. How do I get it working?
As mentioned before this is a WordPress Blog. This is important because I used a plugin on this site to use this tool.
I used the plugin : Google Analyticator
First you will need a Google account setup. You can created one on this page. It should take less than 5 minutes to get going Once that is done you will need to sign up for GA. You can do this here. Simply enter in the required information and you should at the end of this process have a Google Analytics UID shown to you. Very important to copy it.
After you have installed and enabled the Google Analyticator plugin visit the settings page and enter your Google Analytics UID. Simple as that! Google Analyticator has a FAQ and Support page. If you have any problems I suggest you read them If all went well you will then be able to log into Google Analytics and monitor your site traffic. Please note that it may take upto 36 hours for the tracker to become fully operational.
Coming Soon: Using Google Analytics on regular web pages. Also Search Engine Optimisation for Images.
Just a short extract from the song Blue Eyes today.
Blue Eyes
Holding back the tears
Holding back the pain
Baby’s got blue eyes
And she’s alone again
For some strange reason I felt the urge to build something in Python on Thursday.
I am not really sure what brought it on, I guess its just one of those random things. I thought about trying to do two new things. First I wanted to use a timer and second I wanted to try and get a system beep. The best way I could think of combining these two elements would be to build a countdown timer that produces a beep when the time is up.
Here is the code for you to look at:
#!/usr/bin/python
import time
import threadingmsg = ’Input Time In Minutes: ’
uin = raw_input(msg).strip()
intSecAsMin= int(uin) * 60class Timer(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self, seconds):
self.runTime = seconds
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
def run(self):
time.sleep(self.runTime)
print ’\a’
print ”Time Up!”t = Timer(intSecAsMin)
t.start()
Sadly the beep part is not working. I have tried one or two things but nothing seems to work. I have also started a thread on Ubuntu Forums seeking help. I am beginning to think the only way to produce an audio alert would be to have the python script play an mp3 file. Not quite what I am after but an alternative. Still, its been a fun little program I wrote for no particular reason. Learnt one or two things, so not a complete waste of time.
Edit: WordPress seems to have messed up the indintation and consiquently the code will now not run without some adjustments.
A Little Space, A Little Time
See What It Can Do
A Little Faith, A Peace Of Mind
See What Passes Through
The Sun Will Shine On You Again
A Bell Will Ring Inside Your Head
And All Will Be Brand New
Come Alive, Come On In
Here’s Something That You Know
The World’s As Wide As Your Life Is Thin
So Entertain Your Goals
I Can Tell You What You Wanna Hear
I’ve Been There Once Before
You Pulled Me Through My Empty Nights
Sleepless On Your Floor
The Sun Will Shine On You Again
A Bell Will Ring Inside Your Head
And All Will Be Brand New
I recently went to Paris, France to see the one most dear to me.
I really enjoyed my trip despite the very cold weather (-4 degrees celsius during the day). During my visit we decided to go and see one or two museums. Boring I know, but their is a limit to how often you can go see La Tour Eiffel and such like.
As promised to Pleia2 here are some pictures from The Musée Rodin. Hope you like
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We also went to the Musee d’Orsay and were able to view the Van Gough exhibition, not to mention wonderful works by Pissarro and Monet. 
Sadly still in the middle of sorting the pictures out, but I will post them soon.
I am already thinking about my next trip to France, possibly somewhere new. Maybe Toulouse or Monaco. Definitely South, but not exactly sure. Time to start looking at the map and making plans!
The new Ubuntu Beginners Programming Challenge has been set
Here is the announcement on Ubuntu Forums. It has been wonderful to see all the submissions so far. It has been less than 24 hours since the challenge was announced and already several complete solutions in various languages have been posted. Superb Well done to everyone.
Here is my entry in PHP:
<?php
//Set Sum to 0
$sum = 0;
//Specify data file
$myFile = "data.txt";
$file_array = file($myFile);
//Read in the text file line by line
foreach ($file_array as $line){
//Tidy up $line a bit because txt file
$line = str_replace("\n", '', "$line");
$line = str_replace("\r", '', "$line");
//Sort out numbers and text
if (is_numeric($line)) {
//keep running total of numbers
$sum = $sum + $line;
}else{
//Create seperate var containing only letters
$data.= $line;
}
}
if ($sum != 0){
//Display running total if numbers present
echo 'Sum = '.$sum."<br/>";
}
foreach (count_chars($data, 1) as $i => $val) {
//Display count of each letter
echo chr($i). ' = '.$val."<br/>";
}
?>
I have been trying to optimize this blog over the last few days, so I thought I would share exactly what I have been upto
Well, first off let me tell you that this is a WordPress Blog. This is important because I used some WordPress plugins to help my site get discovered by the internet at large.
First plugin that is simply a must is: Meta SEO Pack
It allows you to control the meta tags on your blog. What is a meta tag?
Meta elements provide information about a given Web page, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly. They are inserted into the HTML document, but are often not directly visible to a user visiting the site.
They have been the focus of a field of marketing research known as search engine optimization (SEO), where different methods are explored to provide a user’s site with a higher ranking on search engines. In the mid to late 1990s, search engines were reliant on meta data to correctly classify a Web page and webmasters quickly learned the commercial significance of having the right meta element, as it frequently led to a high ranking in the search engines — and thus, high traffic to the website.
As search engine traffic achieved greater significance in online marketing plans, consultants were brought in who were well versed in how search engines perceive a website. These consultants used a variety of techniques (legitimate and otherwise) to improve ranking for their clients.
Meta elements have significantly less effect on search engine results pages today than they did in the 1990s and their utility has decreased dramatically as search engine robots have become more sophisticated. This is due in part to the nearly infinite re-occurrence (keyword stuffing) of meta elements and/or to attempts by unscrupulous website placement consultants to manipulate (spamdexing) or otherwise circumvent search engine ranking algorithms.
I mainly use it to control the Keywords and Description meta tags. The keywords need a little tweaking, but generally by using them will see your page ranked higher by the search engines. With regards to a good investment of time, I would say YES! It should take less than 30 minutes to setup. On a time cost reward scale I think it is a pretty good return. Important to note that as of September 2009 Google no longer uses Keywords in its page ranking engine. The Description meta tag settings can be changed, however I personally found that the default settings were fine.
The second plugin that is pretty important is: Simple Google Sitemap
It creates a Sitemap for your blog. What is a Sitemap?
Google introduced Google Sitemaps so web developers can publish lists of links from across their sites. The basic premise is that some sites have a large number of dynamic pages that are only available through the use of forms and user entries. The Sitemap files can then be used to indicate to a web crawler how such pages can be found. Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask now jointly support the Sitemaps protocol.
Since Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and Google use the same protocol, having a Sitemap lets the four biggest search engines have the updated page information. Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing. However, a Sitemap is still the best insurance for getting a search engine to learn about your entire site.
XML Sitemaps have replaced the older method of “submitting to search engines” by filling out a form on the search engine’s submission page. Now web developers submit a Sitemap directly, or wait for search engines to find it.
XML (extensible markup language) is much more precise than HTML coding. Errors are not tolerated, and so syntax must be exact. It is advised to use an XML syntax validator such as the free one found at: http://validator.w3.org
So, yes its a pretty good thing to have on your site Simple-Sitemap generates this for you! You do not have to do anything to get this XML file. Once the file has been created the sitemap can be submitted to Google here (under site configuration) and also to Yahoo here. Please note that both Google and Yahoo will require you to authenticate that you own the site. This can either be done by adding a certain meta tag to your home page or uploading a simple html file onto your server. I opted to upload the file, but either is fine.
Okay, so all the SEO stuff is great, but some pages I don’t want to be indexed.
Something’s you do want easily accessible on the web. For example you may have a directory where you keep testing files. You can stop Google and Co , so don’t panic! You will need to create a robots.txt file and upload it to the root directory of your site. Thankfully tools are available to help you with this. I suggest using the Google Webmaster services.
Once you are logged in you should see a menu on the left. Click on: Site configuration. This will display a few other options. The one we are interested in is Crawler access. You should then see the option to generate robots.txt. This will tool will allow you to create your file and block certain directories from indexed Once you have the file simply upload it to the root directory of your website. Simple as that Not only will this stop Google, but also the other major search engines.
Related Article: Setting Up Google Analytics. This will allow you to see how your SEO is faring.
Something nice and slow on a Sunday
As mentioned yesterday I have been working on a new theme for one of my Ubuntu installations. As you can tell I am going for a Mac look. Opinions welcomed. Any thoughts on how to improve the look also valued
