Content Management: June 2004 Archives
With a flick of a switch on Sunday, Dave Winer shutdown weblogs.com. This came as a surprise to people who had been using his free service.
In an audio message posted late Monday explaining his reasons for the shutdown, Winer cited the financial costs of hosting the sites, technical difficulties in moving the blogs to a new server, stress and personal health issues as the reasons for the sudden shutdown.
Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs' owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs' contents.
The .IE domain registry authority (IEDR) which up until now managed the .ie internet domain has been relieved of its absolute autonomy. Last month (May 2004) the Dept of Communications and Marine announced that regulation of the domain would be transferred to Comreg.
Legislation is currently being drafted by the dept to enable this transfer. There are about 40,000 .ie domains registered. A new bill is also being drafted to introduce tough new regulations with regards to the use of the .ie domain. A breach of these regulations could result in a €2000 fine.
Recently Michael Heraghty wrote an article for the Sunday Business Post about how to get properly googled.
The advice is straight forward but practical. Michael has also published an ebook titled "Website Findability"
The objectives of this book are to teach the reader how to:
- Get top positions in search results on Google and Yahoo
- Massively increase the traffic to your site
- Research and target appropriate keywords and keyphrases
- Use techniques that work with major search engines
- Avoid spam techniques and other forms of "cheating"
- Analyze and understand your site statistics
Website Findability: Book on Search Engine Optimization (e-Book format)
Thurles- What happens when you cross the Sims with boring Webtraffic access logs.
Answer: VisitorVille
Now you can watch your weblogs interactively and enjoy the experince.
The code is pasted to your web pages and an application runs on your desktop PC. The price is 30 dollars per month.
The demos are mindblowing and where an instant hit with my web guru colleagues in Tipperray Institute
Acoording to the company
"VisitorVille is a cutting-edge program that takes a radical new visual approach to web analytics. VisitorVille makes data mining simple and accurate, easily performing tasks that are impossible to accomplish using traditional web analytics solutions.
VisitorVille provides visual, intuitive insight into your web site's success. It instantly shows you traffic patterns, advertising success (PPC & SEO), visitor demographics, and how real people interact with your site in real time. It answers the critical questions that you (and your colleagues) have about the effectiveness of your web site and online marketing campaigns.
"
VisitorVille: Web Site Intelligence for Creative Thinkers. Visitor Analytics - Web Site Statistics - Traffic Monitoring - Clickstream Analysis - Live Help.
I have been experimenting with a few different access log analysers.
My requirements are that
1. Its free
2. Provides DNS resolution
3. Runs on Windows
To date the best one that I have come across from an ease of use point of view is Webalizer
The program is less than 1Mb and has the option to resolve IP addresses to DNS names.
The reporting is comprehensive and can be tweaked using config files.
The program runs from the DOS prompt and you can specify how many threads you want it to use.
The price of maintaining a weblog is spam. Eventhough this weblog is in its infancy it has been subjected to various spam messages.
I am now using mt-blacklist (http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/) to combat this problem and it seems to be working.
The install was fairly painless the only requirement being that you use movable type 2.6.
After install it was necessary to download the latest spam list and then scan all entries. It detected the comment that contained spam and with 1 click they were removed.
In future any spam comments will be denied (hopefully). The system has an update feature where you can update the centrally hosted master list with the latest spam that by passed the filtering process.
