Web Coder Plus

Well, as this blog has been gaining gradually more posts, the number of spam bots visiting it has increased. Since I set up Word Press to put any comment with a link in it into the moderation queue, these spam messages never showed up; but it was beginning to be a real pain moderating all these comments.

So, I have installed Spam Karma 2. Seems like a pretty comprehensive package, scarily so. So many options, I’ve decided to just leave it as it is, and then tweak later if it isn’t having the desired effect.

If you have a problem posting comments, just mail me describing what happened (redirects to Gmail so spam ain’t a problem ).

A lot of web masters really hated Google last month as the Jagger update hacked and slashed its way through the SERPs, but it seems that November is Google’s equivalent of Christmas, and there are some big presents under the tree.

Google Analytics

Released on Monday, this beast had web masters scrambling to sign up, so much so that it was brought to its knees. A few days later, and Analytics is starting to work a bit more smoothly, though updates to data are still only happening once or twice a day for me. If you run a small web site (say about 100 visitors a day or less), then I doubt this is going to be a hell of a lot of use to you. Install it anyway, but keep a slightly more “close to the data” stats program as your major source information. Of course once you pass a certain threshold, those smaller stats programs cease to be that useful, and Google Analytics will really kick in. Spend a bit of time learning filters, and which reports you particularly want to see.
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I was very interested to see that MIT have released many of their courses in a new venture called MIT OpenCourseWare. From their FAQ:

1. What is MIT OpenCourseWare?
The idea behind MIT OCW is to make the courses materials that are used in the teaching of almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT available on the Web, free of charge, to any user, anywhere in the world. This venture continues the tradition at MIT, and in American higher education, of open dissemination of educational materials, philosophy, and modes of thought. Educators in the U.S. and the developing world utilize the materials for curriculum development, while students and self-learners around the globe draw upon the materials for self-study or supplementary use. With 1100 courses now available, MIT OCW is delivering on the promise of open sharing of knowledge.

MIT & Usability

Well I looked through their Comp Sci section and found MIT 6.831 User Interface Design and Implementation, Fall 2004, which is an excellent introductory course to user interfaces with detailed course notes in PDF format. The notes cover both web page UI as well as normal desktop application UI. Some things hold true regardless of whether you are designing for the web, or the desktop application; such as these Guidelines for Good Graphic Design:
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Unfortunately I don’t have a lot time to learn Google Analytics right now, but my first impression is it is very good. I will write more once I’ve had a bit of a chance to learn everything I can do with it.

FireFox Rules

One thing that struck me was the browser percentages. Admittedly, I hadn’t set up filtering properly, so my own visits were recorded; but even taking that into account FireFox is the number one browser in use on this blog.

Well, still no news really; 29 hours and still no data. But then it’s free, so what am I complaining about? Well, it sounds like the old paying Urchin customers are suffering from the same lack of data as the rest of us.

A Limited Beta

I remember when Google released Gmail in its first limited beta. So very few people had it, and the few invitations that were around quickly gained in value, causing an entire new business opportunity to spring up practically overnight. When I finally got my Gmail account, the service was solid, barely ever unavailable, and one struggled to believe it was still in beta.

So why now mass release this analytics program, that would obviously be a sensation, and bring this service to its knee’s? Surely a small release to existing AdWords customers (keeping the paying customers on their stable, and separate, servers), would be better? Once up and running, maybe offer the paying customers the opportunity to move over and stop paying, but also giving them the opportunity to stay separate from the new free service. Eventually a month or two down the line you could have everyone on it, and once stable, the remaining customers could be “forcibly” made to stop paying.
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