Home / Posts tagged "Google Rocks"

Guest Post on Ozarks Bazaar: 7 Things I Love–and Hate–about Google Buzz

standard
| by | guest posts, technology

Google Buzz is all the rage. Or, everyone’s buzzing about Google Buzz. Either way, it’s hot right now. I posted my first take on Google’s Twitter-Facebook-Flickr mashup available directly in Gmail over on Ozarks Bazaar, so go check it out. As a teaser, I’ll tell you my seven reasons, but you’ll have to read the article to find out more about them.

  1. It seamlessly fits in Gmail.
  2. It’s public. And I mean public.
  3. You can’t hand-pick your friends.
  4. It’s a one-direction, focused stream.
  5. Without some tweaks, it’s hard to send that stream out to the rest of the Internet.
  6. There’s no way to send a private message to one user.
  7. It has a catchy name.

So what do you think about Google Buzz? Vote in the poll below and let us know what you think in the comments.

Tuesdays with Linden’s Favorite Links | 9 Aug 2008 (Pt. 1)

standard
| by | cool technology, recipes, Tuesdays with Linden's Favorite Links
Simon or Google Chrome?

Simon or Google Chrome?

Today here on Tuesdays with Linden’s Favorite Links, I’m going to start sharing my thoughts on Google Chrome. For those of you who just don’t care about Google, I am including a recipe and a Dr. Seuss-esque running poem. Just click here to skip past all of today’s Google stuff).

 

Last week, I* announced Google’s release of their attempt at creating a new browser from the ground up based on how people use the Internet in 2008. (All of the other browsers are only updated as changes in use happen. They are essentially built on the same code they were when the product was first release.) I like Google, I like the way Google’s philosophies play out in their revolutionary (and free!) products, like Gmail and now Chrome: simple, intuitive, powerful. Today’s links are going to be interspersed as I offer my evaluation of Google Chrome today and tomorrow.

Let’s start with why I like Chrome. For me, it’s a lot of little things. The big things have not really delivered, but I’ll cover that tomorrow.

Logical, usable right-click menu. Hands down, the feature that made me weak in the knees was on the right click menu.

Go ahead, highlight a word you don’t know. Here are a few I’ve had to look up recently, thanks to DYT and others: meretricious umbrage and sartorial. Once you’ve highlighted the word, hover your mouse over it and right-click. Choose “Search Google for ‘[highlighted word here]‘” and Voila! A new tab opens with the dictionary definition a click away.

I loved this feature of my Diigo toolbar and now it’s native to a web browser. Keep it coming! I suspect that if you change your default search engine (Wrench Menu > Options > Basics > Default Search), the change will be reflected in your right-click menu, but I’m a Googler, so I’ll let someone tell us that in the comments.

Search a site once and the Omnibox learns. Sounds a bit ominous, but it saves page loads, which saves time. I have been searching YouTube a lot lately in order to keep up with the conventions**. In Firefox, I would have to load the YouTube homepage, then use the search box. In Chrome, I simply type “Y [TAB] biden speech dnc” and I am taken directly to the search results, NOT via the YouTube homepage. Love it.

Hint: You have to use the search box on a site once before Omnibox learns the site has one. Then you can use the tab-kay shortcut to leap frog the site’s homepage and go directly to search results.

When closing tabs, the (x) stays put. It’s small, I admit, but time-saving. When I’m closing alllll the tabs I have open at the end of the day, Chrome keeps that (x) on each tab right under your mouse until you move the mouse. Since I primarily use a laptop with a touch pad, which I consider much less user-friendly than a normal mouse, this makes my life a little easier.

The home page auto creates itself. I’ve used Opera’s speed dial. I’ve used the rip-off Firefox add-on. But Google one-upped Opera and Josep del Rio: Speed Dial that auto-populates. I love it. If you can’t tell already, I love time-saving anything.

Bonus: Google also improved the “speed dial” page by including four search boxes (mine are history, Wikipedia, Diigo, and YouTube–are yours different?), recent bookmarks, and recently closed tabs.

The logo reminds me of Simon. I’ve never conquered it and I need to***.          

Resize text boxes on the fly. Developers make text boxes a certain size to make the page look pretty, but there are times when you need a bigger text box. Chrome lets you decide.          

Flexible tab locations. Need to detach a tab from the main window (so you can Alt+Tab back and forth, maybe)? Just click and hold, then drag the tab down. It becomes its own window. Need to put it back? Just click and hold, then drag it back. Easy peasy.

Like Google Chrome too? Tell us why in the comments.          

Google Chrome Links

Want to try out Google Chrome? Click here.
ZDNet thinks Google Chrome might crash and burn. Read it here.
Check out Google Blogoscoped Chrome FAQs.

Okay, that’s all about Chrome today. Stay tuned tomorrow when I will reveal the places where Chrome misses the mark for me. Now enjoy some…

Promised non-Google links

Morgan Gets Thin: Sweet Potato and Lentil Curry
Morgan at Morgan Gets Thin has been losing weight by eating healthy and exercising—a true life-style change—for over a year now. She had a tough nine days at the end of August, but is now back on the wagon and eating healthy food. Enough of her readers (me included!) asked for a recipe she casually mentioned in a blog post that she shared it! I can’t wait to try it, but I haven’t seen any sweet potatoes here in Deutschland…
tags: post-to-blog, recipe, sweet potatoes, lentils, curry, morgan gets thin
Half-Fast: And to Think That I Saw It on My Long Run
Vanilla is one of my favorite running bloggers, and this post is a great reason why! He’s funny and imaginative. I’ve “written” blog posts during runs before, but nothing as epic as this Dr. Seuss tribute. Take the time to read the whole thing. You’ll be glad you did!
tags: post-to-blog, running, vanilla, half-fast, dr. seuss, poems, funny

*Along with millions of others
**Since I’m sadly missing what is I am sure 24-hour, ’round the clock, “BREAKING NEWS!!1″ coverage that I would be privy to if I still lived on American soil.

*** Yes, it would be a great birthday or Chrismas present.
diigo it

Tuesdays with Linden’s Favorite Links | 2 Sep 2008

standard
| by | cool technology, Tuesdays with Linden's Favorite Links

This week I’ve got–you guessed it–a couple running links: Nitmos suggests post-marathon celebration, stretching from Hal, and post-run activities to avoid and to indulge in. But I’ve also got a new browser announcement for you. Check it out!

Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser

It’s no secret that I think Google rocks, so I’m pretty excited about using their new browser. Be sure to read the comic they made to explain why Google is developing a browser and how it will differ from Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, etc.

tags: google, Browser, announcement, post-to-blog

Five Fantastic Stretching Exercises
I haven’t been as good about stretching during this training as I was in the past, but it is clear that I need to commit to it during these last 4 weeks of training. This post tells why stretching is so important and offers several stretches for runners. Bonus: It’s on HalHigdon.com!
tags: stretching, athletes, flexibility, post-to-blog

Four Post-Run Activities You Shouldn’t Do (And Four You Should) | Sarah Jo Austin

This is a great post! Even if you’re not a runner, this list will make you laugh. (Is that Jacob??)

tags: post-to-blog, sarahjoaustin.com, sarah, running, advice, blog

Feet Meet Street: Spooning: A Form of Celebration
Well, I guess it’s that time in the training when I need to start thinking about how I will celebrate once I cross the finish line. Thanks to this article by Nitmos, I now know I need to start deciding.

But that’s not why this article is on my links for the week. It’s because of this quote:

But when it’s over, it’s party time!

Or, as much “partying” you can muster with shredded calves, throbbing hamstrings, an unexplainable foul odor vaguely reminiscent of rotted skunk disemboweled by a rabid, ill-tempered wolverine with stage 2 halitosis, and enough body salt oozing from your pores to keep a meadow of deer happy for weeks.

So that’s what Team Linden will have to look forward to after I’m done? Please, don’t anyone tell them, or I might not have a cheerleading squad anymore!

tags: post-to-blog, running, marathon, celebration, nitmos
diigo it

Google Analytics Step Four: Loose Ends

standard
| by | cool technology

There are a few final loose ends I’d like to tie up in this little series, so this last post is going to be a buffet of Google Analytics tidbits. I’ll define a couple potentially baffling Google Analytics terms, explain how to add data to your dashboard, and point out a few Google Analytics reports you might want to check out.

Terminology Explained

Bounce Rate
The first word to take notice of is “bounce rate.” Think of a ball bouncing around a small room. It was tossed in through a window on one side of the room and is bouncing toward the door on the other side of the room.

Your visitors are like the ball, and your blog (or web site) is like the room. If your visitors bounce into your blog and only read one page, you will have a high bounce rate because more people bounce in and right back out again. However, if most of your visitors bounce into your blog, read several different pages, and then bounce out, so your analytics would show a lower bounce rate.

Now, for a normal web page, the goal is a bounce rate between 20% and 35% (it’s like golf: lower is better). For a blog, however, where most of your recent content is displayed on your main page, it is very common to see a high bounce rate.

Visits vs. Page Views
What’s the difference? For this definition, let’s think of your home with all it’s rooms. Now imagine a friend comes over. During that one visit, your friend will probably go into your living room, the kitchen, perhaps the bathroom, and maybe your dining room too.

In this comparison, the parallel to visit is quite obvious: one visit is like the one visit your friend makes. The page view stat is comparable to mini-visits your friend makes to each room in your home, if each room is like a page on your blog or website.

In other words, no matter how many different pages a person looks at on your blog, she will register only one visit, while generating as many page views as pages they look at. Are you seeing a similarity between page views and bounces? The more page views a visitor registers, they will influence your bounce rate in a good way: It will go down.

Add to Your Dashboard

As I said before, Google Analytics is not some free, cheap web stats generator that offers all the real goodies to paying customers. As is the standard for Google products, Google Analytics is free. So I encourage you to explore it as you become more familiar with it. You might stumble across a report that you find interesting, like Entrance Sources or the screen resolutions of your visitors.

You do not have to click through to these reports every time you log in to Google Analytics, though. You can add any report to your dashboard in one simple step: Just click the “Add to Dashboard” button under the page title for every report.

Other Interesting Google Analytics Reports

Now that you know how to add interesting reports to your dashboard for easy viewing, let me tell you about a few of my favorite reports.

Traffic Sources > Keywords and Content Overview (on Dashboard)
Sarah told me about this one, and she actually has some pretty cool results. She discovered from her Keywords report that “any variation of ‘kai springfield sushi’ in Google, [her] original review appears on the first page of results” (Kai Disappoints On Valentine’s Day). The Content Overview report (which already appears on your Dashboard) showed her that her post on Springfield’s Kai restaurant was getting a lot of hits.

Even if you don’t have a record blog post, these two reports considered against each other can reveal some very interesting trends about who is finding your blog and what they are coming for.

One thing to note in the Content Overview or Top Content report, especially on a blog, is that your top site will probably look like this in the Google Analytics report: / Huh? Just a slash? Yep, that’s right. That indicates your main page. For my site, it’s http://xgravity23.blogspot.com.

Visitors > Languages
It’s simple: I like this report because I like languages, and I like seeing which languages pass through my little part of the blogosphere.

Dashboard > Map Overlay
This is by far my favorite report, plus it appears on the Dashboard, so you won’t have to go searching for it. I love looking at which countries are sending visitors. This is highly interactive, so as you are exploring, click away! Clicking on the map can take all the way down to the state level and you can see which cities are sending visits and how many.

This is my last planned post on Google Analytics, but as you are using it, don’t be afraid to email me or leave a comment with your questions. I’d love to help clarify!

Related Posts
Google Analytics Step One: Begin Tracking
Google Analytics Step Two: Don’t Track Yourself!
Google Analytics Step Three: Get Your Stats By Email
Linden’s Pensieve Top 10s

diigo it

Google Analytics Step Three: Get Your Stats By Email

standard
| by | cool technology


Emailing yourself reports is a great way to save time because it automates one process in your life. If you don’t have to remember to log into your web stats, your brain can be spending its power on other more important tasks. At the very least, you can use the automated report as a reminder, much like IWantSandy emails reminders to you so that you you can stop trying to remember every task you have to do.

(Logging in isn’t altogether a bad idea, though, because Google Analytics is very interactive and offers detailed information. You can click on the state of Missouri on the map and see which cities your visits are coming from, for example.)

  1. Once you’ve logged into Google Analytics, click on “View Reports.”
  2. Under the large word “Dashboard” at the top, click on the “Email” button.
  3. Click on the “Schedule” tab.
  4. Make sure the “Send to me” check box is checked.
  5. Since you’re just sending it to yourself, you don’t have to enter anything in the “Description” box, unless you want to.
  6. Click “PDF” for the format.
  7. Set how often you would like to receive the report.
  8. If you’d like to see a comparison for the last time period (selected in step 7), check the box next to “Include date comparison.”
  9. Click “Schedule” and wait for your report!

Related Posts
Google Analytics Step One: Begin Tracking
Google Analytics Step Two: Don’t Track Yourself!
Google Analytics Step Four: Loose Ends
Linden’s Pensieve Top 10s

diigo it

Google Analytics Step Two: Don’t Track Yourself!

standard
| by | cool technology


This step is probably the most complicated part of configuring Google Analytics, but it’s really nice to have because otherwise you think you’ve been getting a ton of hits, when really, it was just you checking how your blog looks or loading pages so you can link to them.

Is Your Tracking Code Installed Properly?

But first, a slight digression. We need to make sure that you have correctly inserted the tracking code on the web page.

  1. Log in to your Google Analytics account.
  2. On the main page, look at the “Website Profiles” box and find your blog.
  3. Scan to the right-most column. If the box is red and says “Tracking code not detected,” then we have a problem! But if you see a green check mark and “Receiving Data,” we’re good to go.

It can take up to 24 hours for Google Analytics to start seeing your code, so you might give it one more day. Here is a Google-sponsored page for troubleshooting this problem–I have never had this issue before, so I don’t have any personal advice on fixing it. If you do encounter this issue, though, comment or email me and I’ll see what I can do.

Excluding Your Visits

Okay, now that we have ensured that the tracking code is being read by Google Analytics, we can proceed to the main issue of today’s post: Not tracking YOUR visits!

First, we have to know your IP address. The easiest way that I know of doing this is by going to WhatIsMyIPAddress. Upon loading the site, your IP address will be displayed. Copy your IP address exactly. Now follow these steps.

  1. Log in to your Google Analytics account.
  2. From the main page, scroll down to the bottom. Click on “Filter Manager.”
  3. On the right side of the dark gray box, click “Add Filter.”
  4. In the “Filter Name” box, type something like “Home computer (Giessen)” or “Work computer (JLU)” so that you know exactly which location you are excluding.
  5. From the “Filter Type” drop-down menu, select “Exclude all traffic from an IP address.”
  6. In the “IP address” field, paste your IP address.
  7. Add a backslash \ before every period in your IP address.
  8. In the box below, click on any blogs you wish to ignore your visits, then click “Add.”
  9. Click “Finish.”

Now that you have told Google Analytics to ignore visits from your computer, you can feel free to load your blog on excluded computers as much as you want–you won’t see your visits counted!

EDIT: These steps apply only if your have what is called a “static IP.” That is, if your IP address never changes. (Be sure to recheck it and change your Google Analytics filter if you have to reset your router/modem. This action will cause your IP address to change.) But what if you have an IP address that changes every time you connect to the internet, a “dynamic IP”? The smart guys at AnalyticsExperts.com wrote an excellent and detailed post about solving exactly that problem. Thanks to liz who asked this great question!

EDIT #2: Unfortunately, the post that explains how to exclude dynamic IPs does not contain the promised link to the script source required to actually exclude your dynamic IP, effectively making the post useless. I have notified AnalyticsExperts about the problem, and will update once they’ve solved it or “answered my inquiry.”

EDIT #3: Thanks to Phil LeClair for point me to this article, “Count Me Out!” on Analytics Talk, we now have an answer to our question about excluding dynamic IP addresses. Since I have static IPs, I’d be interested to hear from those of you who needed this info: Did LeClair’s link solve your problem? Thanks!

Related Posts
Google Analytics Step One: Begin Tracking
Google Analytics Step Three: Get Your Stats By Email
Google Analytics Step Four: Loose Ends
Linden’s Pensieve Top 10s

diigo it

Google Analytics Step One: Begin Tracking

standard
| by | cool technology

After my post yesterday which reported a few stats for this blog from Google Analytics, I realized that a few of my dear readers might enjoy having the same knowledge about your blogs.

And I realized that some of you might be intimidated to use Google Analytics. However, I really think that Google Analytics is simple enough: It has a lot of power and offers complex data, but it is very user-friendly and intuitive. I think you’ll like it if you give it a try, so I’ll lead you through it. This is the first of at least three posts that will get your blog set up with Google Analytics.

As Julie Andrews sings in one of my all-time favorite movies, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start!” Here are the steps to setting up a Google Analytics account on a Blogger blog. (Because Google Analytics uses JavaScript, you cannot use it to track visits to a MySpace account blog or page, as the MySpace admin frown upon tracking for some strange reason. You can also use the Google Analytics tracking code in any regular HTML web page.)

  1. Visit http://www.google.com/analytics and register using your Google account.
  2. Click “Add Website Profile” at the bottom left of the page. NOTE: You can always add more sites to this account later by clicking this button and following this process again! I use one Google account to track four different sites.
  3. Enter the URL of your blog and your time zone, then click “Continue.”
  4. On the next page, click on “New Tracking Code” and copy the code that appears in the text box.
  5. In another window, go to your Blogger account and click on the “Layout” tab at the top.
  6. In the skeleton view of your blog, click on “Add a new page element,” which will give you pop-up window.
  7. In the pop-up window, right column, select the fourth option down from the top, “HTML/JavaScript.”
  8. Paste the code you copied from Google Analytics.
  9. In the title field, you can write something like “Thanks for Visiting!” or you can just leave it blank. No one will be able to see that you have tracking installed just by looking at the web page if you leave it blank.

That’s it! Not too hard, now was it? You will have to wait until tomorrow before seeing any results, as Google Analytics does not show any data for the current day. Tomorrow, you can log in and see if you had any hits.

Any questions? Is there a part of this set of instructions that doesn’t jive with what you see on your screen? Leave a comment so we can fix the problem publicly, in case other have the same issues.

Related Posts
Google Analytics Step Two: Don’t Track Yourself!
Google Analytics Step Three: Get Your Stats By Email
Google Analytics Step Four: Loose Ends
Linden’s Pensieve Top 10s

diigo it

Have you ever wondered…

standard
| by | cool technology

…how your Gmail arrives in your Inbox? If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you know that I think Google Rocks! And they can have fun with themselves too. While making millions of dollars and providing and improving many free, highly functional Web apps, like Gmail, Google Docs, PicasaWeb, Blogger, and plain ol’ Google searching (or iGoogle, your personalized search page).

Oh, so back to the video. Google invited users to record a clip showing a part of how a Gmail email goes from the sender’s inbox to yours. Check it out! Personally, I wish Sarah and I had thought of and recorded the relay race clip. Oh well. :)

P.S. Thanks, Sarah, for helping me get this video in my blog!

diigo it