I've just completed the rollout of the Google Analytics code to all 6 blogs. At least now I will have standardized, reliable analytics across all my blogs (Test and Live), to give me a better idea of where to focus my efforts. I’ll also have a consistent “start date” for the stats across the board.

At first glance, it looked as if I would need to edit the HTML Template for each blog, something I try to avoid as far as possible. After a little searching, however, I found instructions for a widgetised install, i.e. using the Add a Gadget (formerly known as Page Element). The whole process took only about half an hour in total.

If I’d know it would be this easy, I would have tackled it sooner! Now I just need a few visitors…

The next step will be to seek out and destroy any remaining code for any other analytics services I’ve tried out along the way.

Note to self: Make sure you don’t delete any useful history in the process!

All the Google goodies for webmasters can be accessed from this master page:

Google Webmaster Central

Technorati Tags: Add a Gadget (Page Element), Edit HTML Template, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Central, Website analytics

• 0 comments »

I’m in the process of testing the brand new Amazon Associates widget: the Page Recommender Widget. The code is live on both Workbench and Birkenreis (Old). Here’s what they had to say about it in the message announcing it:

The Page Recommender Widget displays links to other pages on your site and links to Amazon products – both tailored to each individual visitor's interests using the same world-class recommendations technology that powers recommendations on Amazon's own site. Visitors will spend more time on your site as they discover new content that is relevant to them. In addition, you will earn referral fees based upon our highly targeted product recommendations.

Talk about going from famine to feast! I now have three alternatives for recommending other pages from my sites to visitors: this one, outbrain and Sphere. Outbrain is basically a done deal, and the Amazon offering looks promising because it combines page AND product recommendations. I’ll probably put Sphere on hold until they come up with a better way to deploy their code.

This is a quick and dirty post, so no links or tags.

• 3 comments »

Just finished the rollout of the outbrain code to all my blogs. I thought it only gave blog publishers the /5 star rating facility, but it seems it offers a whole lot more! I will put together a more detailed post IDC. Thank goodness I didn’t just opt for the Blogger in Draft star rating setting.

I’m now thinking I don’t even need the Sphere related content stuff. That would have been a whole lot more work, as it requires code snippets to be manually inserted in each HTML template (groan).

Next rollout will be the ShareThis widget.

outbrain - Content Ratings & Recommendations

• 0 comments »

I’ve just gone through the process of drafting and entering brief descriptions for my family of blogs (referring to Blogger’s Settings/Basic/Description field). The descriptions are still a work in progress; expect to see changes and refinements until they have completely bedded down. No changes to that for my oldest blog, Altneuland. For now, “Advocating a secure & just Israel...” pretty much says it all. Adding more words would simply be superfluous.

Workbench	Maskil Beta/Draft/Pre-Production/Test (Please see “View my complete profile” for the real stuff)
Birkenreis (Old)	Superseded. Content has been migrated to Cafe Birkenreis and J-Blogosphere
Altneuland	Advocating a secure & just Israel...
Cafe Birkenreis	Jewish pluralism ~ progressive Judaism ~ Outreach and a welcoming Judaism ~ Inter-faith relationships ~ Jewish Patrilineal (Equilineal) Descent ~ Religion and State in Israel
J-Blogosphere	Getting to grips with the technology side of blogging and running a small office/home office (SOHO)
Plant More Trees	Conservation, ecology & environment ~ Consumer advocacy ~ Retail ~ Life in Just Another Failed African State ~ Plant more trees!

• 0 comments »

I’ve made a number of changes on the Comments settings across all blogs. The most significant change has been to the setting “Who Can Comment?” which is now set to “Anyone - includes Anonymous Users”. I’ve always suspected I might be discouraging comments by using the “Registered Users - includes OpenID” option, as this obviously doesn’t allow for anonymous comments.

I hope I’m not opening myself up to a barrage of spam and hate mail. I do still have the following safeguards in place though:

Comment moderation: Always
Show word verification for comments? (CAPTCHA)

I’m also trying out “Comment Form Placement” as a “Pop-up window” instead of “Full page”.

• 0 comments »

Test post.

Post in order to test the "Powered by ScribeFire" configuration setting of ScribeFire.

This is in order to see if it would work in place of a badge in the sidebar.

• 1 comments »

I am in the process of implementing new Blogger/Blogspot XML templates across all my blogs.

Please bear with me, as there may be some disruption, broken links and widgets, etc., during the transition.

I will be utilizing various 3-column layouts from the eBlog Templates website. (See the link below.)

Free Blogger Templates and How-To Blogger Articles | eBlog Templates

• 0 comments »

Post created to test the display of an embedded picture from the PicApp site. Picture goes here:

Image details: Google Announces Quarterly Earnings served by picapp.com

OK, that looks better. I guess I should have taken them seriously when they said embed in HTML Edit mode, not Compose/Preview mode!

• 0 comments »

This is a test posting to verify ScribeFire's support for Blogger's Post date and time and Scheduled Post features.

It's now about 11H54 and I will modify the time stamp to 12H00.

Technorati Tags: ScribeFire, Blogger

• 0 comments »