Blogs

A couple of readers emailed to ask how we got favicons to show up in the comments section of this blog, hopefully this post will explain the process so you can install favicons on your blog too.

One of the great benefits of using icons on blog comments is that it encourages reader participation and makes readers comments stand out. If you don’t currently have a favicon for your blog you can either create one yourself or borrow a nice 16×16 pixel image from here. If you want to create your own favicon just design an image and reduce it to a 16×16 pixel square and save it as a .ico file. For more details this guide to creating a good favicon is a good read.

We don’t actually run BlogStorm using an off the shelf blog platform such as WordPress, all the code behind this site is custom written, which makes adding details such as favicons very simple – if you are a php coder.

Favatars WordPress Plugin

Most of you probably run WordPress and my intention was to write a nice plugin for you to download but luckily somebody has already released one. Download the Favatars plugin and you can have favicons on your comments in minutes.

The Code

If, like me, you don’t run WordPress you will probably need to use some custom php code to add favicons to your comments.

The first step will be to add an extra column to your comments database, I called my column “favicon”.

Next you need to add the following php code to the file that processes your comments and adds them to the database when they are submittted.

$url=$_GET["url"];

The script cleans up the url and then checks whether the file http://www.website.com/favicon.ico exists. If it does then the favicon url is stored in the database. If it doesn’t exist then the url of an alternative 16×16 pixel image is stored instead.

If you have any questions or just want to see your favicon please comment below.

BlogStorm was launched on Thursday 7th June and the first week was certainly a success. We received lots of positive press as well as a nice stream of traffic from some of the popular blogs and social networking websites.

The main referrers are listed in the report below from Google Analytics. As you can see Digg sent a load of traffic as did del.icio.us and Stumble Upon.

Most readers might be surprised to see SU sending so many visitors but if you can create some really top quality content and seed it with a thumbs up its really not too hard to see over a thousand visitors.

Some of you will no doubt want to know how much we have spent on the site so here are the stats so far, which don’t really compare to the $12,107.09 Kawasaki wasted on his new site.

• $0. The total development cost was zero since I coded the site myself. Taking into account my $60 per hour charges the costs might be considered a bit higher than zero, however.
• $0. We haven’t done any marketing of the site yet, I have a budget for this in the future though.

These figures just go to show the power social media can have in launching a site. Forget about paying for conventional marketing, just make sure you hire somebody who can work the blogosphere.

Positive Press

Thanks to the following for their support:

Al, Self Made Minds

I reckon Patrick has come up with a winning tool here and I must admit I do have the feeling of “Why didn’t I think of that”, nice job.

Azzam from OS Candy

If you look over at the site you will noticed that the A list of blog sites are tracked by BlogStorm a marvellous feat and achievement for one man in the humble hills or Yorkshire, UK.

Darren Rowse, Problogger noticed how many links one of his posts had attracted and commented that BlogStorm

could be useful as a blogger wanting to track incoming links on your own blog on a post by post level.

Michael Arrington, TechCrunch

a great way for bloggers to see which of their posts are more popular.

thanks to SEO agencies and digital agencies for the help on this.

The Advanced Google Analytics Tutorial raised more questions than it answered so I have spent this afternoon going through everybody’s comments and trying to answer them.

If you have any more questions please feel free to ask in the comments at the end of this post.

Google has just announced a few new features including the ability (finally) to click on referring url’s and be taken to the referring page.

Michael asked:

Is there a way to see stats based on a specific day? I’d love to be able to see which pages are more popular as I’ve changed my site over time. I might change link position or something for a week and it’d be nice to see stats for that time period only to be able to compare them.

Click on Content > Top Content and then scroll right down to the form that says Find url and type the page you want to view the stats for. In this case I wanted to view stats for users clicking on my outgoing (affiliate) links.

From the chart below we can see that the link outgoing/top (named because it was at the top of the page) has had 1060 clicks in the time period selected.

If you look to the top right of the screen you should see a drop down box containing a data range.

Click on the box and enter your desired date ranges in the boxes (hint: click on the box and then the name of the month at the top of the calendar to highlight the whole month) and then click the “Apply Range” button.

The result should be a graph comparing data from the two date ranges, one range has a blue line and one is shown with a green line.

Hunter asked:

How do we track flash movie plays with google analytics?

Tracking Flash events is the same as tracking JavaScript events, just call the urchinTracker function:

javascript:urchinTracker('/homepage/flashbuttons/button1');

Example Flash Code

on (release) {

on (release) _

//Track with action

getURL(“javascript:urchinTracker(‘/folder/file’);”);

_root.gotoAndPlay(3);

myVar = “Flash Track Test”

}
onClipEvent (enterFrame) {

getURL(“javascript:urchinTracker(‘/folder/file’);”);

}

More details

LGR asked:

Is there anyway to attach the onclick event handler on a link I want to track without editing the html, perhaps at the bottom of the page? Just wondering if it is possible to separate the HTML from the javascript so it is easier to maintain.

Motorcycle Guy asked :

Surely there is javascript to add that javascript to every external link? it seems dumb to have to rewrite your whole application.

I don’t think there is an easy way to do this. The best way would be to make your site database driven and append some automatic variables to the events you want to track.

Another solution would be to give each of your links an id parameter and then to track clicks on each id and register the event that way.

If anybody has any better suggestions please post in the comments.

f4rrest commented:

There are some things still only available in the old UI though, such as graphing country-specific visitors.

Clicking on Visitors > Map Overlay and then the Country detail level and finally selecting the graph view I was able to create the chart below. Is this what you were looking for? I suspect you wanted to see how traffic from a certain country changed over time but this isn’t possible unfortunately.

Slides asked:

Can GA be used to track registered users and their activity on site?

I don’t think GA is the right solution to track individual user sessions and activity on a website. Depending on the data you want to track it sounds like a php application would be best.

darnit commented:

I would love to know how to view the pages sending traffic in the referring information statistics. Not just the domain but a link to the actual page sending traffic.

Clicking on Traffic Sources > Referring Sites and then clicking on del.icio.us (or any of the other sites on the list) you can see a list of the referring pages as well as build a pie chart to visualise the data. Click the “Views” icons to view the pie chart.

This method falls down on sites where the referring page is site.com/page.php?id=12345 as Google strips the id parameter off. It works fine for most blogs as they tend to use a folder structure rather than dynamic urls.

Any more questions feel free to ask below.

thanks to SEO agencies and digital agencies for the help on this.

Pingdom have released a nice new tool today to test how quickly your website loads. The service loads up your site including images and javascript files in the same way as a standard web browser to give an accurate measurement of the load speed.

How fast is your site?

Most people know that eBay advertises on just about every single search term using Google Adwords but it seems they could do with some negative keyword matching as well.

I should point out that I’m not actually looking to buy a stolen caravan, just doing some research for a client. . This probably won’t please any caravan insurance companies out there!

Update: following lots of peoples questions I have posted Google Analytics Tutorial Part 2 many thanks to SEO agencies and digital agencies for the help on this.

Since Google Analytics was launched in 2005 it has become one of the top analytics packages for small to medium sized websites. Growth was initially slow due to the frustrating waiting list system initiated by Google to avoid over stretching their servers. Now that the waiting list has been removed anybody can sign up to use this great service. Continue reading »

Are you tired of people using images from your website without linking back to you? This simple script has the answer.

View the demo here (right click on the image). Note that I prefer to only run this script for users who arrive from an image search engine rather than for everybody. Continue reading »