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Guest Bloggers

If you read my other blogs, you probably already know we have had some emergencies within the family that led to me putting blogging on the back burner. While I hope to be back soon, I am opening my blogs to guest bloggers.

Since blog(a)gory is about blogging, what better place to host guest bloggers. Guest posts can be about blogging, tools, blog promotion, social networking, web design, SEO, tools, conferences, or even an article about your own blog and why you write it. Your post will include your URL(s) and will bring blog(a)gory traffic back to your site.

If you are interested in writing a guest post please contact me directly at christa at linuxchic.net or leave a comment. Include your URL, your email address, and what you would like to write about and I will follow-up with you. I would like to host several guest posts per week over the next few weeks.

Thanks for your patience, understanding, and loyalty to blog(a)gory while I am on hiatus. I look forward to hearing from you.

Upgrade to WordPress 2.5 the Fast and Easy Way

WordPress 2.5 is out and the new interface and features make it a slick version to upgrade to. You should upgrade self hosted WordPress blogs for security reasons if not just for the looks and functionality. Technorati has issued an ultimatum to those who do not upgrade to help keep the spam and splogs out of their directory.

There are several methods of upgrading your WP blog including downloading and copying over your old install, using SVN to check out the upgraded files, and one of the fanciest and slickest methods I have found is to use the WordPress Automated Upgrade plugin.

The WordPress Automated Upgrade plugin does exactly what it's title says. Once you install and activate the plugin you can go to Manage in your Dashboard to prepare the upgrade through the plugin control panel. It downloads the latest version of WordPress, backs up your DB and files (don't forget to download them), puts your blog in maintenance mode, disables your plugins, then upgrades your install. After it is complete it checks your plugins before activating them.

Once you have upgraded to 2.5 you can automagically upgrade plugins from within the WordPress Dashboard to make sure you have all the latest and greatest (and patched and compatible) plugins for your install. WordPress upgrades and administration has never been so easy.

I upgraded several of my blogs using this plugin from a patched 2.3.2 version to 2.5. It was seemless and my themes worked just fine afterwards.

If you are interested in more information about WordPress 2.5 check out the FAQ posted at Weblog Tools Collection. They have compiled a great list of questions and answers about the upgrade and added a second post for the FAQ to answer even more questions readers had.

Beautiful (FREE) WordPress Themes

SmashingMagazine has a list of 20 free professional and truly first class themes guaranteed to make your WordPress blog a sight to behold. Now is definitely a good time to consider revamping the look of your blog.

Increase Your Exposure

One of the quickest ways to increase your exposure is to guest blog on another blog. Not only does it bring traffic in from the visitors of the other site but it also allows you to post about topics that might be off topic or even more specific from the subject of your main blog.

Remember though, if you are blogging about a completely different topic than your main site, the visitors might not be interested in both subjects and it won't necessarily increase your traffic substantially. If will however give you more experience as well as a chance to write about other interests.

The biggest roadblock for most people though is finding a blog that will welcome your posts. For those just getting started or with limited options for guest blogging, there are several services which will happily take your blogging submissions.

HubPages: An online publishing ecosystem it calls posts "Hubs" and allows them to provide commentary or rich media utilizing images and videos. Since Hubs are free floating posts, you can write about any topic in any niche and are not tied to just one subject. Hubs can be organized into groups so that visitors can view Hubs from different authors on similar topics quickly and easily. Hubbers (HubPages authors) have a chance to share revenue from their posts as well by imputing their Google Adsense, Amazon Affiliates ID, or Commision Junction ID into the system. My favorite thing about HubPages is their Requests System. Through the Requests you can get great ideas for Hub topics by looking at what other people are hoping to read and not finding.

Squidoo - Squidoo is also a no long-term commitment service that allows you to publish individual posts on varied topics. Squidoo calls their version of the single post or page a Lens and also allows you to share the revenue or donate your portion to charity. Squidoo is very popular as a method of sending traffic to your blog.

Gather - Gather socializes the content it's members create allowing posts, images, and audio created by it's author community to come together for similar topics. Gather also shares the revenue from the ads that are displayed on your content that is published at their site.

Qassia - Qassia helps new bloggers promote their site by adding "intel" (their word for content) to the Qassia network. The more intel you contribute, the more "credits" you earn (backlinks) thereby the higher the rank for your site. Qassia also has a revenue sharing system promising 100% gross revenue to the authors of the intel. Unfortunately, Qassia is currently in a closed beta period so if you want to get started before it is opened to the public you will need a referal from someone who already has an account (you can click signup from a members' profile page).

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15 Stats Services to Track Your Site Visitors

While there are more than 15 stats providers out there, I wanted to compile a list of those that I have found to be the best or the most used by the communities. If you have found one that I missed, please leave a comment and tell me about it.

1. SiteMeter - Easy to install javascript or html tracking code with detailed tracking for a free account and more robust reports for the premium accounts. Stats can be emailed weekly as well as being viewable on the SiteMeter website.
2. ClickyWeb Analytics 2.0 - Javascript tracking code with a 2.0 feel to the reporting dashboard and a high level of detail available on your visitors. Easy integration into your blog as well as your WordPress site. Up to three domains for free with other packages available for purchase.
3. GoogleAnalytics - Javascript tracking code for stats analytics to compliment website adwords campaigns. "Google Analytics helps you find out what keywords attract your most desirable prospects, what advertising copy pulled the most responses, and what landing pages and content make the most money for you."
4. StatsCounter - Simple and free stats recording for your website providing hit counting, tracking, and web stats.
5. WordPress.com Stats - Stats plugin from WordPress.com which enables you to track visitors and stats from WordPress.com dashboard even on blogs hosted elsewhere. While free, you will need a WordPress.com account to get the API code to enable the stats.
6. Feedburner Stats - The Google purchase of Feedburner flipped all the pro services to a free for all status. Feedburner stats, once enabled tracks your feed subscriptions and hits and with a code insertion on your site, can track your site statistics as well.
7. Mint - Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referrers, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint's flexible dashboard. Mint is not a free services and prices start at $30 per domain.
8. AWStats - AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers. AWStats must be installed locally on the webserver or where ever it can access the webserver log files. AWStats is a free product.
   
9. Webalizer - The Webalizer is a fast, free web server log file analysis program that produces summaries of traffic from webserver log files. Webalizer is free software.
10. 103bees - It's an online service for webmasters, bloggers and internet marketers that is highly focused on natural search engine traffic analytics. 103bees provides real-time statistics and detailed information on search terms making it a great tool for search engine optimization (SEO) and internet marketing.
11. Firestats - A locally installed stats system supporting any PHP page (Standalone), Django Drupal, Gallery2, Gregarius, Joomla, MediaWiki, trac, WordPress, and WordPress MU. Firestats is free for non-commercial use.
12. GoStats - Packed with lots of great features, including information on page views, return visitors, and page popularity, this free hit counter is a quick and easy to use tool for determining how many people visit your website. A pro version is also available.
13. SlimStat - A free self hosted stats program originally part of ShortStat. A ready made WordPress plugin is available in WP-SlimStat.
14. Performancing Metrics - Is the exact same stats program as ClickyWeb Analytics 2.0 but running on the Performancing domain and on a different database for the backend. If you already use Performancing you can use your login here rather than create a new account at Clicky.
15. eXTReMe Tracking - Free tracking service showing numbers, percentages, stats, totals and averages from simple counting your visitors until tracking the keywords they use to find you.
    

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A Grain of Salt with Google Analytics

While not a huge fan of Google Analytics I find it a necessary evil for compiling my stats from all my sites. Typically, Google Analytics only reports a small fraction of my actual site traffic for Alternageek.com. Being a podcast we have traffic to our RSS feeds and that traffic gets missed. Also, if a browser is blocking javascript, that visitor won't get counted either. If a browser is blocking Google from setting a cookie when visiting your site, your number of uniques will be off from the actual number of uniques vs. returning visitors.

Take Google Analytics stats with a grain of salt. If you are running a stats system on your webserver that greps your webserver logs (Apache access logs and such) then your webserver reported numbers are going to be the most accurate numbers out there. Your webserver logs will report how many times it is requested to serve up content from your site.

Many advertising companies require you to have a third party stats reporting system because they just don't trust you to give accurate measurement. The problem with Google Analytics is that is requires javascript to be executed to count visitors. For a lot of websites, that might not be a major issue, but if you are a tech related site, you might see a huge discrepancy in the reports when looking at Google Analytics especially if your audience is mainly tech savy power users.

Browsers have the capability of blocking cookies and javascript from executing which will cause the stats reported back to Google to be inaccurate and possibly considerably lower than your actual traffic. Firefox addons such as No Script block execution of malicious scripts to protect users but also end up blocking your tracking code which mucks up your numbers.

What is a lowly blogger to do? My suggestion is to use more than one statistics system and use the average of them. Don't just pick three javascript stats systems, pick different systems with different reporting methods.

If you are hosting your own website, check with your host to see if they offer AWStats. AWStats is an open source application that uses your website access logs to report traffic and stats in a human readable format. I run BetterAWStats in addition to AWStats to make the layout of the reports even easier to use. Another self-hosted stats program available is Mint. Costs for Mint start at $30 per domain tracked.

A great third party reporting system is SiteMeter. Sitemeter has a javascript tracker and an html tracker so you can pick either to grab stats. You will lose referring site information for visitors if you don't use the javascript code but you will catch visitor counts for those who block the code. A basic account is free and there are commercial packages available for a fee which provide more robust reporting.

Another option is using a reporting system that uses an image to track hits rather than a script (such as SiteMeter's non javascript tracking code). There are browser options and plugins to block images as well so this method will have it's own list of pros and cons.

Overall, Google Analytics has it's advantages when using Google Adsense because it's integration is unparralled. If you are looking to track the effectiveness of your advertising campains Google Analytics can't be beat but if you want reliable traffic reporting, you should use other stats apps in addition to Google's.

Thursday: 15 Stats Services to Track your Visitors

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