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Apr 162013
 
Google Trend Analysis

I’ve had a look at this a couple of times already, but now I am re-thinking the way I will go forward with this site/blog and doing some Content Planning, this is an interesting resource: Google trends.

Based on keywords you put in, it displays the historical searches in Google on that keyword. After putting in the main keywords of my site, I find these results:

This graph, including the forecasted bit clearly shows the decline in one of my main topics; Lotus Notes. This is strange, because until now, this is the topic that generates most visits on this site.

However, these trends are based on Google search queries and not on the links people click on. Meaning that even though there are less and less people searching for lotus notes, if there is little information available (small amount of quality search results) there is a larger chance that they will end up on my blog, than when people search for example for SharePoint where many people write about and loads of information is available.

Some data from a quick Google Search would give us the following:

  • Sharepoint: Forecasted on 68 in April, About 91,100,000 results
  • Lotus Notes:  Forecasted on 8 in April, About 32,200,000 results
  • Mindstorms: Forecasted on 4 in April, About 5,810,000 results
  • Intranet: Forecasted on 94 in April, About 103,000,000 results
  • Pinhole: Forecasted on 3 in April, About 12,000,000 results

Taking these numbers, and splitting the amount of results by the amount of searches, would give us a more realistic indicator on how my topics would do in April (taking a few things out of the equation, like paying for ads or sudden events affecting these queries).

  • Sharepoint: one in 1.339.705 searches
  • Lotus Notes: one in 4.025.000 searches
  • Mindstorms: one in 1.452.500 searches
  • Intranet: one in 1.095.744 searches
  • Pinhole: one in 4.000.000 searches

The smallest numbers in this list would be the topics with most positive results. In order of quality:

Best Intranet 1.095.744
Sharepoint
Mindstorms
Pinhole
Worst Lotus notes 4.025.000

As you can see this ranking slightly differs from the above trend graph. The trend graph does however show what topics are rising and which ones are declining. Using the above calculation you can quite easily do some Content planning and more or less figure out when writing about a certain topic will become more interesting for you and  when not.

 

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Mar 052012
 
podcast_icon

On the right column, I’ve added a list that displays the latest Tech Podcasts from several sites.

For now, I list the ones from:

“Gweek is a weekly podcast where the editors and friends of Boing Boing talk about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.”
The first magazine devoted entirely to DIY technology projects, MAKE Magazine unites, inspires and informs a growing community of resourceful people who undertake amazing projects in their backyards, basements, and garages. They also have a great youtube Channel and a ųTorrent app that will keep you up to date.
WIRED is the first word on how ideas and innovation are changing the world.
The BBC’s flagship tech TV show. On BBC Breakfast Sat 0645, Sun 0745; News Channel Sat0130, Sat/Sun1130, 1530 in the UK. Also on BBC World News, & iPlayer.
The Boagworld show is the longest running web design podcast and has something for everybody, whether you are a designer, developer or website owner

 

As soon as any other interesting ones appear, or come to my attention, I will add these to the list. You can hit the small RSS iconRSS next to the title to add the complete stream to your RSS Reader, Download software, etc.

It was quite easy to create a single RSS Stream using Yahoo pipes, I’ll post about that soon! 

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Sep 262011
 

By the end of last week, I received some comments on the bad rendering of my site in a mobile browser. Not really on an iPhone, iPad or an Android phone, but in all the other small screen browsers. I found it looked rather nice on an iPad last week!

I found a wordpress plug-in to solve this problem, called the WordPress Mobile Theme pack. It took me a bit to configure it, but I think I’m almost there.

The main configuration problems where related to the menu I use on top, which is based on another plug-in and not on the standard WordPress menu. I had to take the standard one out of the theme header.php file to make sure people where not presented with a list of about 20 pages, ranging from the Christmas puzzle to other stuff I try to keep hidden ;)

That problem seems to be solved now, and aside from a few validation errors and still quite a long load-time, which I have to have a look at I think it looks quite well. Please have a look for yourself (use your mobile ;) ).

- WordPress Mobile Theme Pack Plug-in

- Mobile Web Test Website

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Mar 232011
 

It’s a bit tricky to find how to enable Gzip compression on pages hosted on the 000webhost, a free hosting service.

Gzip compression is server-side compression of web pages that can lower the amount of data the browser has to download around 60-70%

gzip compress wordpress Enable Gzip Compression on WordPress Blog

There are many techniques to do so, but most common is to modify the .htaccess file in your site root directory.

Most of the ways to add compression contain flags or parameters based on Apache modules that the 000webhost chooses not to use, a pity but there is a solution.

 

If you add the following lines to your .htaccess file, gzip compression will work:

 

php_flag zlib.output_compression On
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 5

 

You can test this by going here, add your URL and check the test button.

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Mar 102011
 

I tend to use this site a bit as my playground. I play with the CSS, wordpress platform and its plug-ins among other things.

Usually this causes quite some visual changes to the site, or functional changes that might be for the better, or for the worse.

I stared using an online tool to get feedback for my site. Not the typical scan for CSS errors tool, but feedback by people who make an effort to maintain the feedback constructive and with a certain level of quality.

Feedback Roulette LogoFeedback Roulette works in a very simple way. You earn Feedback Points by reviewing peoples websites. As soon as you’ve reviewed the first, people start reviewing yours. The fact that the feedback given needs to be rated guarantees the quality of the feedback.

Best thing of all…. It’s Free!

 

So If you have a sit you’d like some honest, people-generated feedback on, give it a shot!!

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Sep 162010
 

image Since I saw on my stats that I have some visitors from Latin America, The Netherlands and and Spain, I just installed the Gtranslate plug-in for my Blog.

It’s a simple setup to have a small translate dropdown like you see on the right here.

The translations are well… like most machine translations a bit quirky. This one however, is using community corrections, and should therefore give a more reliable result.

Since I’m limited to 5 languages only ;) I’d like that if you use it that you let me know the result in comments. Thanks!!

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Sep 032010
 

Just a short note for people that are trying to make the Google Analyticator wordpress plug-in work with a site hosted for free on 000webhost.com.

 

When you authenticate through the Plug-in settings page, you will get an error like:

 

Failed to authenticate with Google. Read this support article on Analyticator’s support forums for help.

 

It won’t work and there is no need to follow the troubleshooting steps mentioned in the linked support article.

The reason is that 000webhost, when using the free hosting service, does not support SSL connections. these are required by Google/the Plug-in to authenticate.

 

It seems that the only option you have is to upgrade to paid hosting… Could have guessed…

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Jul 222010
 

This is the first post I’m writing using Windows Live Writer. To be honest, and I’m quite critical when it comes to Microsoft products, the setup was really easy. Just had to fill in the blog URL, my username and password, and it did the rest.

I wanted to try this out for some time now. Mainly because i work off-line quite a bit lately and come up with idea to write about. Also, the word press install on my free webhost is very slow. I posted about that before (WordPress Upgrade to 3.0 – Update Timeouts), but that also means that writing a post might not be a problem, but adding images and formatting is hell.

For now, it looks nice, it imitates the end result of the post really well…. It is as much wysiwyg as it gets I guess, and switching to preview is really fast too!

Ill be playing around with this for a couple of days and hopefully you’ll see the positive effect on the layouts soon!

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