Someone was asking me about traffic statistics packages the other day and I had to suggest Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics
First Google Analytics is free, which is always nice. You just need to sign up through Google, add your web site profile by adding your web site address. Then Google will generate some code that you need to post onto the pages of your web site that you want to track. This can be a little tricky if you use a content management system, depending on the system.
Once you have it set up and Google has tracked the code on your page, they will track:
- Visitors
- Page views
- Bounce rate (how many people visit one page and leave)
- Average time on site
- Referring sites
- Percentage of traffic from referring sites, search engines, and direct traffic
- Some click through traffic (showing you where visitors go when they visit the site)
Here’s my second task on the 23 Things on a Stick. I’ve been learning about library 2.0 today through a video, article and blog.
I enjoyed the video from the guy from SLA – although I wasn’t thrilled to use Firefox to view it. It’s been a while since I worked at a library so it’s hard to me to speak as an insider – but simple as it is if I were a librarian today (and I always worked at small special libraries) I’d be all over email lists and RSS feeds to push update to patrons on the topics that I knew were following.
I also enjoyed Blyberg’s 11 reasons why Library 2.0 exists. He’s right on the need to re-think management to effectively use Web 2.0 tools. I think flattening out the organization chart with the 2.0 tools is a good thing – but then I work alone so that’s probably a testament to how I handle working with others right there.
Today’s Byte is pretty specific – but it you have a web site hosted on Go Daddy and you want to create a password protected section – you’re in luck.
(If that isn’t you – here’s something else to help while away the hours – http://www.websudoku.com a web site of Sodokus!)
GO Daddy is a cheap web host. (I use them a lot.) They just added a feature that makes it very easy to password protect folders on your web site.
Here are the instructions:
http://help.godaddy.com/article.php?article_id=4057#protect
It only works for web sites on Linux servers. It looks as if they’ve just automated the process of creating an htpasswd file – but heck it’s easy and it works. SO I like it.
Have a great Valentine’s Day tomorrow!
It’s been a long week in Dublin so I’m going to cheat and tell you about a cool tool that I haven’t used – pbwiki: http://pbwiki.com
A wiki is a web site that anyone can edit. Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) is probably the most popular example. If you visit the site you’ll see that you can edit an existing entry.
pbwiki lets you create your own wiki and you can make it private or public and you can use it like shared workspace. You can upload a number of great features including a calendar, voice-chat, YouTube video, and more. They have a handy video on their site that explains it all. http://pbwiki.com/content/tour
Excaliburprima does event planning and conference management in Dublin, Ireland. They had a site that they liked but it wasn’t doing well with the search engines. Once I dug into the site I realized that the web developers had built the site on their own server and only pointed (and masked) the domain name to a folder on their server.
So Google thought their web site was only one page long. A single-page web site will never do very well. So we recreated the existing site and posted it on its own server.
