Online Chat

Use the window below to chat with me (if I'm online ...)

Use the edit nick field above to let me see your name.

cazh1: on Business, Information, and Technology

Thoughts and observations on the intersection of technology and business; searching for better understanding of what's relevant, where's the value, and (always) what's the goal ...

Sunday, October 16, 2005

New blog editing tool, and some notes on measuring traffic

Saw an interesting post on Fun & Profit on a new tool and service called Zoundry. I don't do this blog stuff for the big bucks, so I'm not necessarily going to sign up for the referral service ... but I perceived an opportunity to address a couple of minor wish list items for my blog editor tool. To date, I've been happy with WB Editor, simple and bug free; however, the long F&P post (part 1 of 2, more on that in a sec) caught my eye with the tagging feature. With WB, I have to create the tag HTML by hand (via a nice little bookmarklet by Matt from Oddio.com, apparently no longer available via the net). Zoundry makes it easy to set up tags for Technorati, del.icio.us, Ice Rocket, flickr, Buzznet, 43 things, and Live Journal.

<aside> This makes me complete a CSS tweak that I'vebeen intending to make for a while. I was never sure why the Technorati tags reallyneeded to be visible at the bottom of each post, so now I'm just adding display:none to all the right divs. (Catching up on some other CSS stufffor my Site Updates blogas well). </aside>

The tags thing is key because I'vebeen noticing that site traffic is less than thrilling when I focus on page views- but the requests traffic is going up quite nicely ...

Click on the picture for a full-size image!

Note that page requests is pretty flat, while general requests are going up steadily (see here for a decent definition). I take this to mean that folks read my content via RSS, not by visiting the site (enforcing the idea that I'm apparently not in this for the bux, as 4ds3ns3 is rendered invisible). A nice little blurb on Biz2.0 made me realize this is not so far-fetched, and validates why we continue to see annoying advertising is RSS feeds.

I do keep my eyes out for various methods of increasing my visibility here; for example, my favorite ping "service" is Pingoat, and I recently saw some nice traffic bumps from posting links on digg and reddit.

In any event, the changing traffic level, and the response from the digg and reddit postings, makes me want to drill into the whole cause and effect thing - which gives me a nice excuse to ramp up my ego searches. I've had a "Linking Blogs" link at the bottom of my posts for a few months (gone now, keeping it simple), but that just does a Technorati check, and they've been getting less than stellar notices in the posts I read. Suspicions were confirmed this weekend when I happened upon references to a previous post in other blogs, which is fun but I'd rather see that stuff without having to rely on luck. There's a nice page on FeedForAll that has a summary of ego check methods. We can also wait for better stuff from the search kings - Yahoo's is apparently RSN, and Google's effort is generally considered passable, but doesn't do what I'm looking for (finding me in blogs, not blogs about me).

(back to the Zoundry editor) Now, there are some nice features that I lose in the transition. The Part 2 "review" post has a pretty accurate summary of the good and the bad - in addition to the tag stuff, I like ...

Some cute little buttons on the top - Apply Code Formatting, for example, nicely makes my little CSS sample above look all nice and and tech-y, in that Courier font.
The ability to change the date and time on the post. At first, I though about backdating some posts, because I get a little self conscious when I go a few days without posting. However, since I'm trying to understand which posts impact traffic, I'll probably not use it at all.
If I've copied link to the clipboard, and then click the button to create a link in a post, Zoundry assumes I want the link to be the contents of the clipboard. Nice.

... and I dislike ...

The inability to save and load files in .doc or .html format. I have a number of partial posts and post ideas, which were easy to quickly capture with WB Editor, for future elaboration. this tool does it a bit differently, and I'm going to have to play with it for a bit.
Sure, it sees Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V as Copy / Paste, but what about Ctrl-Insert and Shift-Insert? Maybe it's my Microsoft upbringing, but I am used to those keys, it would be nice to get them added.
Ok, while I'm building the nice links above for Technorati et al, I notice that I don't care about the last three - no photos, and I don't use LJ. I will only assume that future updates may add more sites that do heavy linking.
I can't directly tweak the HTML, and I like the ability to do that. I find I am very particular about the way images appear on this blog, and I want it to be just-so - so much so that I will end up posting this entry, then editing it using good-old WB Editor to make the image (above) behave the way I want.

I think there are a few more features I need to play with ...

(Update) Ok, I really don't like the icky HTML that Zoundry puts out - not that it's illegal or non-standard or anything, just not along the same lines that I've been putting out, and I guess I fear change or something. Anyway, sorry Z, you're out for now, but I do like the style of your tags 0 I guess I'll just have to manually do something to cover the other services ...

Technorati : blog search, css, digg, ego search, ice rocket, reddit, technorati, traffic, zoundry