How Many Site Hits? Depends Whoâs Counting
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Even though online advertising is growing fast, that growth is being stunted, industry executives say, because nobody can get the basic visitor counts straight.
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As any developer will tell you, putting a website out on the internet is only half of the equation. The other half is trying to figure out some of the visitors (and how many of them) coming to your site. That's where this new article from DevShed comes in.   If you have a website, especially one that sells products or services, it can be useful to track the visitors to your site. This article explains how to write a program that will do just that.   They offer a database-based suggestion for recording various pieces of visitor information, including: IP address, date/time of the visit, pages viewed, browser type, and the referring page. They give the database structure and the PHP code needed to push the data into it. They also include some simple analysis code/SQL to show the different habits of your visitors and place them into an easy-to-read dynamic HTML page.
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Web 2.0 companies, observe how Loic rolls his product out. It's done personally. Not with a big bang, but with nurturing, one user at a time, at first, then it will fan out, but it will always have the personal touch, because it began that way. In contrast, giving an exclusive to one press person or one blogger can be much less effective. It may get you on top of the ladder for a moment, but the glory fades fast, and then what? And your first impression is in the hands of someone else. What if he or she doesn't like you or your product? (Or worse, if they have a conflicting interest, I've seen it happen.) You could get sandbagged. Most PR firms show you how to do the big bang rollout, because that's all they know. But even the greatest promoters, with the most press credit (I'm thinking of Steve Jobs) won't rely exclusively on the press to carry their product. They guide it, they put their personal signature on it, they create an experience. No doubt in the next few days there will be a lot of rollouts because of the Web 2.0 conf in SF. The only ones you'll read about here, with any positive juice, are the ones that roll out with personality.
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Is Microsoft-served ads slowing down Web sites? Plus, what is Ask erasing, and what are the others keeping? And a 'Knight Rider' comeback and more.
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DynamicWebPages.de has their latest PHP Usage Statistics posted today. Things just keep looking up for PHP usage - this month it gained a good chunk of domains from last month.
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How Much Does StumbleUpon Rock? Rand Fishkin must have mentioned StumbleUpon about gazillion times at SES San Jose as a &#8216;not to be overlooked&#8217; part of a successful link-bait-2.0 web marketing strategy and I&#8217;ve noticed that whenever one of our stories get Dugg, Populared, or Reddited.. StumbleUpon referrals usually follow suit and bring in a nice [...]
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In March 2002, I made a bet with Martin Nisenholtz about the relative importance of weblogs and the New York Times. I was and am a blogger, and Martin worked then, as he does now, for the Times. For the actual terms of the bet, read the piece on the LongNow site, and a story I wrote to announce the bet. A few comments.  1. It seems now is the time to decide who won the bet, if either of us did. 2. The world that I hoped would come about did not. While blogs have broken many stories, they have not, in general, turned into the authoritative sources I hoped they would in 2002. When the blogosphere resembles journalism it's often the tabloid kind.  3. I wouldn't mind losing the bet. That is, I wouldn't mind if the Times fully embraced the web, and I suspect Martin wouldn't mind if blogs rose to the quality of the Times. 4. If the bet had been held a year later, it seems there would be a pretty good chance that Martin would have won the bet because they recently took down the firewall at the Times, allowing search engines to index the full content. In the past, articles would remain visible for a couple of weeks then you'd have to pay money to access them. I believe they have a special deal with Google and other crawlers that allow them to get past the membership wall. For most of 2007 the Times articles were behind the firewall, and were less likely to be pointed to (which is how they rise in rank at Google). 5. It certainly is fun to speculate, but the decision about who won belongs exclusively to the Long Now Foundation. They have to decide who determines what the top stories of 2007 are, and imho they should consult with search experts to determine how to do the queries. Apparently it makes a difference how you do it.  But ultimately it's their decision. 6. Whether Wikipedia has more or less results seems to be a sidebar to the bet, which only talks about blogs and the Times. 7. Another interesting sidebar is rich media. In 2002, before podcasting had taken hold, before YouTube existed, it would have been hard to forsee the story of the South Carolina beauty queen, or the Don't Tase Me Bro guy. Questions about the future are always framed in the context of the past. Did the question Martin and I asked have any value in 2007, or did it just say something about the world of 2002?   Update: Paul Boutin who arranged the bet, apparently in conjunction with Google (I didn't know this) in 2002, weighs in.
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Did MySpace beat out Yahoo! for page views?
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Last year proved big for blogs and bloggers, according to data released from The Pew Internet & American Life Project. Blog readership jumped 58 percent between February and November, and comprised 32 million U.S. citizens in 2004. More than 8 million U.S. citizens have created a Web-based diary, and one in 10, or around 14 million U.S. Internet users, has contributed thoughts or comments to a blog.
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Jonathan Street has a tip for those developers out there that have no other choice than scraping content from a remote site - don't make it obvious. He also includes a suggestion on how to make it a little less obvious.   A couple of hours ago I was playing around scraping some content from a website. All was going well until suddenly I couldn't get my script to fetch meaningful content. [...] The first thing I did was stop visiting the site for 15 minutes or so and then increase the time between requests. It briefly worked again but quickly stopped.   One simple change to his user agent string in his php.ini made the problem evaporate pointing to a user agent filtering happening on the remote side. His helpful hint involves two methods - one in just PHP and the other in cURL - to change the user agent that your scripts are sending. An even better sort of solution might be some sort of rotating array that would alternate between four or five strings to make things even more random.
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Now that a couple of hundred Lab readers have told their online matchmaking stories, let me tell you mine. After visiting the eHarmony Labs for my Findings column on matchmaking, I wondered if its algorithm would match me and my wife, Dana. So we each registered separately with eHarmony and answered the 258 questions. We [...].
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My friend Brian Smith of Comparison Engines and SingleFeed is currently running a promotion for Search Engine Journal readers to help them submit nd optimize their shopping cart feed for free to Froogle / Google Base. Cyber Monday is only 10 days away.  If you&#8217;re not up on the shopping comparison engines, you&#8217;re potentionally [...]
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Over on the Rojo blog  Chris writes:  "Thanks very much to Steve Gillmor for alerting us to a bug in how we, and other aggregators, were parsing New York Times RSS feeds. In short, stories older than 7 days or so were linking to abstracts of the articles, not the full articles themselves. This is something we will fix. Steve speculated that perhaps the "Times doesn't want server-based aggregators such as Bloglines and Rojo to consistently allow permalink access beyond seven days." Fortunately we don't see any evidence of that and in fact believe NYT has done a great job in making their content available via RSS, particularly by including a specific "partner" parameter on the URL for RSS aggr ...
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Andreas Gohr has posted some info and code about one of the social networking/linking services out there, StumbleUpon. His post includes PHP code to figure out what your site's StumbleUpon ranking is.   StumbleUpon recently(?) added a "search result enhancement" feature to their toolbar. It adds StumbleUpon "star ratings" to Google results (See screenshot). This got me interested and I had a closer look at their extension...   As part of this "closer look" he came up with the code to return a general ranking for the URL you would give it. It does require a StumbleUpon auth key and username, but if you use the service already, you're one step ahead on that.
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So you recently went to search for your local small business site and wondered why three other similar businesses came up before yours? The answer is &#8211; they&#8217;ve been doing their homework. Meaning that they&#8217;ve taken the time to optimize their sites for local search, which can be very rewarding. If you pass on this, [...]
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Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
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Did you know that backlinks from YouTube are easy to create and show up as counted inbound links in Yahoo Site Explorer? Neither did I until I read Neil&#8217;s post at Link Building Blog : Building Links through YouTube The way this works is that if you are one of the top 5 sites that drives the [...]