There’s been an increase in the number of blogs starting up. It’s like we’ve reached some sort of critical mass where many more people know what a blog is than did even a year ago. I see blog after blog with one post (quite often the WordPress “Hello World”) and maybe a “I’m going to use this blog to talk about my self, my navel, my pet turtle, and other trivia” and then nothing after that (but the sounds of summer crickets).
But for those few who find blogging an exciting medium to connect with other minds floating out on the Internets, here’s a very quick stats primer:
When you want to talk about traffic to your blog, tell me about the Unique Visits not the number of Hits.
Every time a visitor loads a page from your site in their browser it may generate any number of hits. For example, every image on the page counts as a hit. You may have one visitor but it might register as 10 (or more) hits. More images on a page adds up to more hits. Can you see that this number isn’t particularly useful?
Unique Visits are much more useful for looking at the actual traffic to your blog. To calculate this number, the IP address of each visitor is counted once. This number reflects the number of visitors who actually came to your site to see what’s up with you today. Page views add a bit more information, collecting information on how many pages each visitor opened.
For more detail, check out this old page here. It’s from 2005 but is still a good explanation.
Holy schmoly what a list! If you’re looking for a way to tell a story using Web 2.0 tools you’ve got to look at this list of what’s out there at this moment web history:
http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools
The list was compiled by Alan Levine and works best when you’ve already got your story idea or concept developed into an outline. Once you’ve done that, skim the list by category and pick the tool that sounds like the best match.
Hat tip to Brian Lamb at Abject Learning.
So there’s this new application out there — you may have heard about it — it’s called “The Facebook.”
I jumped on briefly when Rob was doing some developing and wanted me to do some testing with him. I know people who are deeply involved with their Facebook accounts but I didn’t really think of it as “my sort of thing” so set up my profile using just my first name and initial. I was also troubled by the privacy issues connected with Facebook.
Go figure that people I know in real life found me and friended me there and this weekend the circle grew again. (more…)
I’m blown away. Something that *should* be, actually *is*.
Say for instance you have a gmail address with a “.” (dot) in it, say for example sixteen.punches@gmail.com. If someone sends mail to that address — or the same address but does not include the dot the mail will find you at the right address.
Sixteenpunches@gmail.com sends mail to my account at sixteen.punches@gmail.com
I’ve tried this with several different address and it has worked every time. I can only log into the account that I created and if I try to create the other one I’m told it is unavailable.
This is how the Internet is supposed to be: it’s just supposed to work. It shouldn’t depend on people knowing what they’re doing, or doing everything exactly right — it should allow for a bit of understanding and empathy. 
The contact is trying to find you. There’s nothing wrong with a little help.
I wrote a while back about my struggles opening .docx files. Though not exactly obscure, they were new at the time and presented an unnecessary headache when all I wanted to do was read the document. Today I was presented with another new-to-me file extension: .hqx
Some other people who also received the document complained about being unable to open the file (so suddenly I became interested in what might be inside, motivating me to open my mail too). A little experimenting has shown that Open Office opens the file quite nicely, with all formatting preserved. Textpad was also able to open it although in text-only (naturally) so the fancy indenting and emphasis, etc were stripped.
For those interested in the details, .hqx is the file extension for BinHex encoded files. From Wikipedia:
BinHex, short for “binary-to-hexadecimal”, is a binary-to-text encoding system that was used on the Mac OS for sending binary files through e-mail. It is similar to Uuencode, but combined both “forks” of the Mac file system together, along with extended file information. BinHexed files take up more space than the original files, but are far less likely to be corrupted in transit.
In other words, it’s a Mac thing.
