A couple of years ago I talked about Google Alerts. (http://byteoftheweek.wordpress.com/2005/06/15/another-look-at-google/) In short, you tell Google to track certain terms and they send you an email when they add web sites that contain those terms to their database. I love it for tracking rural broadband issues. (I track that kind of thing: http://www.blandinonbroadband.com/.)
I wished that there was a resource where I could track terms only on Minnesota pages or Minnesota news sources. Magic presto – I got an email from Mark in West Virginia on a new service that does just that.
State Newslines (https://www.statenewslines.com) tracks news sources by state. They have free and premium services. I know it’s not like me but I use their premium services so I’ll start by talking about them.
For a fee, I can have State Newslines keep track of words and phrases as they appear on Minnesota news publications. I think monitor about 50 sources. I have them track [broadband and internet]. Each morning I get an email with any articles that contain one of those terms. It’s like a super focused Google Alert and it saves me time and gives me a heads up on articles I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. Also I can search Minnesota-only publications at any time.
For free, I can check out the headlines from MN papers on one page and I can do a keyword search of Minnesota-only publications.
OK maybe I’m the last person in the world to know how easy it is to zip a file or folder using XP. In case I’m not the last I thought I’d share what I learned today:
How To Zip a file or folder
1. Select the file or folder you want to compress.
2. Right click and choose Send To
3. Slide Right and choose Compressed (zipped) folder
4. Allow the file or folder to compress.
5. You should now see an icon with the same name plus a Zip
o It may even have a zipper on the folder.
6. This is the compressed file that you may put on the server or send via email.
If you want to send a large file or a whole folder to someone via email is often makes sense to zip it first to compress the size. It makes it easier to send but more importantly easier to receive as a smaller file. To unzip you can generally just open the file and files should automatically expand. One word of caution, you shouldn’t unzip files from people you don’t know or even from people you know but aren’t expecting to send you anything. It is very easy to send a virus in a zipped file.
I’m on vacation this week! So I’m tempted to give a cure for sunburn – but we have been good and I can tell you with confidence that we’re as pale as ever – but not in pain.
I have talked about Google Analytics before but I have a renewed interest: http://www.google.com/analytics/
Google Analytics is a free web traffic software. It’s good and it’s cheap. But my favorite thing? You can schedule regular (weekly, monthly, quarterly) email updates on your traffic.
You need a Google account (which is free) and then you’ll need to sing up and post some tracking code into the pages of the web site that you want monitored. If you use a template for your site, you can add the code there and that will work. If you don’t/can’t access your code you can easily send the code to your webmaster and she should be able to add it for you.
