I hope everyone had a great weekend. I know I did. I got far more coding done than I really expected to, and started on my first WordPress theme, which, with a little luck, you’ll see here soon!
In case you haven’t seen it on Slashdot or Digg, or any one of about 15,000 blogs this morning, Google has released a statistics package to further their internet domination.
I, for one, welcome our new statistics-tracking search engine overlords. I welcome them so much, I’ve written a WordPress plugin (already) to support their service!
So if you’re ready to start testing the Google Analytics service (assuming you can get their page to load, it’s hammered), just follow these simple instructions:
- Dump
add-analytics.phpinto yourwp-content/plugins/folder. - Activate the Add Analytics plugin in your Plugins panel.
- Enter your User Account in the Options->Google Analytics panel.
- Wipe hands on pants, wonder if that’s really all there is to this, and wait for those stats to come rolling in!
As always, this plugin seems to work for me, but your mileage my vary. If you run into any problems, please let me know in the comments here, or feel free to drop me an email!
With your Technorati tags, do you need an account with them, or how does it work? I’m thinking of setting up a blog and know these tags drive search engines your way, but not sure how to use/set them up?
Any advice appreciated.
No account is needed. I use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for Wordpress. It simply adds a “Tags” area at the bottom of the posting form, highlighted below:
The “Get Keyword Suggestions” button spits your content off to Tagyu for a bit of analysis, then returns a list of possible tags that you can simply click to add. The Tagyu service isn’t horribly accurate in my experience, but it’s pretty cool none-the-less.
After you add your tags, you simply publish your post as normal. The plugin does the rest (adding the tags to the bottom of the post, etc.). There are more options than I care to pay attention to, as far as which tag service you want to link to, logos to display, various styles you can apply… it goes on and on.
Needless to say, the tagging of the post is by far the easiest part (although I wish it would display tags I’ve used previously so I could just click them again to add them to the new post).
My problem is deciding which keywords to use… How detailed should I get? Is half a dozen tags the max, or should I add as many as possible? I guess I’m not up on the tagging etiquette yet…
I think you definitely should start a blog. Hell, I think everyone should start a blog… I love getting opinions and viewpoints from other people and around the world. The more the merrier! :)
Well, even though it displayed the screenshot (poorly, but it did) in my preview, it stripped it on submission. You can check it out here.
Thanks for all that. Flickr is blocked at work, so will have to check it out at home.
Cheers.
Hmmm. Looks interesting, now I just have to find me a free Wordpress host…
You could try out Wordpress.com, their hosted service (run by the WP devs).
They also have a list of hosting providers that include Wordpress. Personally, I’d recommend DreamHost. They’re some cool people and have a pretty neat blog as well.
Of course over on the cheap (read: free) side of things, there are services like Weblogs.us and Blogsome which will give you a free Wordpress blog. I doubt they let you upload your own plugins and themes (for security reasons), just like Wordpress.com, and who knows if they’ll stay in business for tomorrow, but it’s worth noting.
Personally, if you’re going to go with free, I’d go for the horse’s mouth (so to speak) and snag a Wordpress.com blog. I think they’ve got a lot of cool features still to come, and you really can’t beat a service hosted by the developers of a package, now can you?
Google anal… giggle :).
Yeah… Tried it yet? It pretty much sucks anal too.
“Your first reports should be ready within 12 hours.” About 36 hours later, wow, there’s a report! So far I’m very much less than impressed with this service.
*Sigh* And I thought it might actuall prove to be a (free) competitor for Mint… It would appear I was mistaken. Oh Google, how I’ve begun to despise thee…
Yeah, I just tried to login to google analytics and it spit me back to /ig… I never even got to see a report from them, and it was still at gathering data after using it for over 60 hours. Now I can’t even login… Great?
I had e-mailed them at 36 hours because it was getting kind of silly, and their response was that they were having “unexpected demand.” Lets see, the biggest search engine on the Internet releasing a otherwise $200 (or $400 from Urchin) package for free to every webmaster. Surprise surprise.