I've been using Twitter for a few weeks now. Following a few friends and a few favorite artists has been fun, but one useful follow was Step Forth Web Marketing (suggested by my good friend, web diva Cathie Walker). They try to limit their tweets mostly to useful links about web design, site building, and marketing/SEO.

On Wednesday, they twittered: "Pretty darn cool software for anyone wanting to ensure credit is given to your content that is copied http://tcr1.tynt.com/." I went over to the site and discovered the beta version of a funky little javascript tool called Tracer. I just got approved for the beta and installed it here on Brainhandles.

I'll quote their technical FAQ here...

Q. What user actions does Tracer measure?
A. Tracer is designed to measure user engagement in a completely new way. Currently, Tracer measures when a user:
1. Copies text
2. Copies an image
3. Highlights content while reading

Read more: "FAQ - Technical topics « Tynt Blog" - http://blog.tynt.com/?page_id=130#ixzz09f8QfCOp

Notice that "Read More" line at the bottom of the quote. That wasn't on the page. That was added by the Tracer script when I highlighted and copied if from their FAQ. Now, in general, it's really very easy for someone to just delete that line when they paste your content to something, but it also sort of acts as a reminder that they should credit the source and gives them a direct link for doing it.

Overall, though, I'm really interested to see what kind of stats they generate and how those stats break down. Understanding what bits are being highlighted and/or copied on my pages is an interesting insight as to how people are engaging with my content. Are all the highlight/copy actions going to be the bits of PHP code I post occasionally, or am I going to be finding people copying favorite quotes from the novel I've been publishing here?

If you've got a blog and you host it yourself (installing their code in the footer.php file within WordPress was a buh-reeze), you might want to consider signing up for their beta and trying it for yourself.

So, I was looking at my Google Analytics stats for my traffic so far this year...

While IE just edged out Firefox, it was seriously tight. The four Firefox flavors that occupied the top 10 came in at a combined total of 43.82% of traffic, coming in just behind IE's 43.85 percent. But those are rounded percentages. If you add up the visits, out of the 35,000 or so since the beginning of the year, IE leads Firefox by a mere 8 visits. My biggest surprise was how much traction Google's Chrome browser picked up. Of course, Google is providing these stats...

First, some people may be asking "what is a 'splog'?" The word comes from the combination of "spam" and "blog" and its usually a completely useless blog site with no real content (either randomly generated crap or nothing but "borrowed" content) that exists for no other reason than to try to trick the search engines in an underhanded link building scheme or is actually trying to capture search traffic in the hopes that people will arrive, realize the site is worthless, but will choose to click an ad link to leave instead of hitting their back button.

If you have a blog, you may find that you see "pingbacks" coming from sites that are reposting your content and then linking back to you. If these sites are running Google AdSense ads, there are a couple of ways to fight back.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you use the mobile browser detection script (this is a techy script for web developers who want to know if a page's visitor is using a phone/PDA browser or a "real" one), I've recently posted an update to it to accomodate the combo of IE8 on Vista and some software from Creative with an auto update feature. One of the substrings it looks for in the "user agent" string is "pda". You'll find that in the word "update". I've added an exception for that. I may need to visit that script in the new year, test it against the latest WURFL, and do some overhauling.