I received a ton of nice comments from Rob, John, Scott, and Phil related to my previous post, What Software Bloggers Do Girls Like Better? Phil even did a nice follow up post, with some good humor gloating, until the end where his wife let the air out of his sails; like only a wife can do.

The day I posted the article, Scott instant messaged me to say good job on the article. During the conversation he mentioned that I should compare the stats to Oprah.com as a base point for the other statistics. So naturally I thought this would be a good follow up article.

Usually to gauge the effectiveness of a relative score, like the percent of girls that visit your site, you need at least two points that fall on opposite ends of each other. These two points need to be based on similar vectors, in this case women, but are based on an outside source. Obviously Oprah is huge with women, so oprah.com is a natural choice for the high end, but I had trouble thinking of a super-nerdy site that would be suitable for the low end, but have enough traffic to give a good basis point. I finally settled on World Of Warcraft, worldofwarcraft.com, as my low end. Mostly because every time I think of WoW, I think of this South Park episode:

The results of this, non scientific, study was very disturbing. Mostly because about 3 out of 25 people who visit WoW on the internet is a female, which blows me away because I was expecting something like 1/50.

This means means the World of War craft beat out Jeff, Joel, and Scott, and Phil is slightly above the WoW site at about a 5% lead.

The numbers for Oprah was about what I expected, and probably align very closely to her TV numbers with about 85% of her viewers being female.

If anybody has a better website, than World of Warcraft, for me to compare these guys against please let me know.

Tags: Google, Google Ad Planner, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman

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Today I received an invite to Google Ad Planner.  As I was playing around with this new tool, I was really blown away by how much information Google has collected on specific websites.  So much so that I wanted to share this tool with my readers, but I couldn’t come up with an interesting way to demonstrate the capabilities.  Until I started looking up some of my favorite bloggers and saw the almost embarrassing balance between females and males.

So today I am going to analyze

• Scott Hanselman
• Phil Haack
• Jeff Atwood
• Joel Spolsky

with Google Ad Planner, to find out who is more popular with the ladies, Scott, Phil, Jeff, or Joel.  I know this is one of those questions that has been hotly debated by nobody, but I thought it was a good mechanism to demonstrate what kind of information Google Ad Planner can show.

Please note that I wanted to also analyze, Rob Conery and Jon Galloway too, but their data was yielding results that I don’t think was accurate.  Possibly because Google didn’t have enough information to classify them yet.

What is Google Ad Planner?

Google Ad Planner is a free media planning tool that can help you identify websites your audience is likely to visit so you can make better-informed advertising decisions.

With Google Ad Planner, you can:

• Define audiences by demographics and interests.
• Search for websites relevant to your audience.
• Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
• Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan.
• Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.

Get to it already, which blogger is it?

According to Google Ad Planner, from least likable by the ladies to most likable by ladies…  drum roll please… is…

3rd Place - Jeff Attwood

2nd Place - Joel Spolsky and Scott Hanselman

1st Place - Phil Haack

I am not sure how Google Calculates these metrics, but if I had to do an analysis, purely on speculation of why Phil Haack won.  I would conclude the following:

1. Phil has a very nice and ascetically pleasing website, where the other 3 candidates have more of a utilitarian design.  (much like mine)
2. Phil and Scott had pictures of them self on their frontpage and seemed to do better than Jeff and Joel who didn’t.  By a pure numbers game, Jeff and Joel should have been leading the pack because, they had a broader reach, and thus higher page ranks.
3. The last one, which I think is most important for attracting the ladies to your blog is: Phil was the only blogger to post a picture of himself with his son, on the front page.

Hope you enjoyed this preview of Google Ad Planner, it has some really nice analytical features that will help anybody doing a high level comparison of demographics for different websites.

Note: I didn’t include my self in this analysis, because Google Ad Planner didn’t actually have an info sheet compiled for coderjournal.com.

Tags: Google, Google Ad Planner, Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, Phil Haack, Scott Hanselman

Posted in Programming, Review | | | View blog reactions | 12 Comments »

So today I saw this Google Flash Ad, for John McCain for President, appear on a site that I am developing. I thought I would let everybody know to watch out for Google Flash Ad’s that have access to modify your browser. This isn’t a big deal, in my case, but Flash has the ability to also modify, other things such as:

• Browser’s Footer
• Browser’s URL
• Back Button
• Forward Button
• etc.

Basically Flash is allowed to have more access because it actually runs as an application on top of the browser instead of through the browser. It is just disturbing that Google doesn’t police the advertisements better. It is conceivable that Google could potentially be providing malware via their ad network.

Tags: Adsense, Adwords, Google

Posted in Rant | | | View blog reactions | No Comments »

As many of you may know I love Google Talk. I love it because of its light foot print both on my hard drive and when running in memory. I love the integration with all my Google services. And I love the flexibility that it provides. If you would like a copy of it, you can download it as part of the Google Pack. Or by it self from http://www.google.com/talk.

However the Google Talk team just gave me another reason to love Google Talk. It now allows me to have direct conversations with my visitors with a simple click of the mouse on the chat bubble you see to your left.

This new feature is called chatback and allows you to integrate Google Talk in to any website you have access to add HTML. Chatback uses the web-based Google Talk Gadget so your visitors don’t need to download anything. It opens in a new window so they can keep chatting with you even if they browse to other pages.

Of course, chatback isn’t just for blogs. You can use it on any web page that you can add HTML content to. To get started, visit the chatback start page. (This is also linked from the Google Talk homepage.) Then just copy the provided HTML snippet to your web site. Visitors will then see a badge on your site indicating your availability, and can click to start a chat with you. If there’s a time when you don’t want to be distracted, just set your online status to “busy” and visitors won’t be able to chat with you until you change your status back to “available.”

So now if you want to chat with me about anything and you see a Green dot. You have the go ahead to say hi or ask me any question you want. I may not always respond, because I sometimes forget to turn of GTalk when I am in a meeting or giving a presentation.

Tags: Blog, chatback, Google, GTalk, Instant Message, News

Posted in News | | | View blog reactions | 5 Comments »

So today I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Google Operating System, and I saw an interesting development on the Google Docs front.

Google Spreadsheets has a new feature that lets you create a form to accept data. When you go to the Share tab, there’s a new option to “invite people to fill out a form”. The form is very simple and can be customized by changing the order of entries, their labels and the type of answers. It’s also a nice way to get feedback people who wouldn’t normally collaborate on a spreadsheet.

This is really exciting stuff, especially for many of my clients that just want a quick and dirty form to ask a couple questions of their customers. The bonus is that it comes out in the format everybody wants. Microsoft Excel! Here is what the Offical Blog Post had to say:

Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet. You can even keep a closer eye on them by adding the Google Docs forms gadget to your iGoogle homepage, created by software engineers Valerie Blechar and Sarah Beth Eisinger (in her first month at Google!). It lists your recent active forms, with new responses highlighted. Add this gadget to your iGoogle page:

To test this out I created my own survey for my readers to tell me how I am doing? Located at: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pmGAQxFEGHWGV6o0976XeJQ

I found that you can use/host the forms in the following ways:

1. In an <iframe /> with this URL http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key={your key}
   
2. On your own page with a standard form POST to http://spreadsheets.google.com/formResponse?key={your key}
   
3. In Emails with a standard form POST to the same URL as in number 2

So I see an immediate impact on my life in rolling out custom forms to my clients to help them gather the information that is important to them.  Also if you have the time there are some questions that are important to me.  So if you wouldn’t mind please click here or on the left in the navigation bar:  How is Coder Journal doing?

Tags: Gadget, Google, Google Docs

Posted in How To, Review | | | View blog reactions | 1 Comment »

Google has extended its support for Google Bot restriction by giving us web developers a new tool to stick in our belt. It was announced today on the Google Blog that you can now control access to your non-HTML files on your website with a simple header. The header X-Robots-Tag will allow you to do everything the normal Robots Meta tag will, but now you can do it for the PDF, Word, Image, and any other document you can think of that is served via HTTP. They also announced on the same post a new type of exclusion cause that lets you set when the document will be unavailable, see below for more information on this new feature as well as currently supported ones for use with X-Robots-Tag:

• INDEX|NOINDEX - Tells whether the page may be indexed or not
• FOLLOW|NOFOLLOW - Tells whether crawlers may follow links provided on the page or not
• ALL|NONE - ALL = INDEX, FOLLOW (default), NONE = NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW
• NOODP - tells search engines not to use page titles and descriptions from the ODP on their SERPs.
• NOYDIR - tells Yahoo! search not to use page titles and descriptions from the Yahoo! directory on the SERPs.
• NOARCHIVE - Google specific, used to prevent archiving (cached page copy)
• NOSNIPPET - Prevents Google from displaying text snippets for your page on the SERPs
• UNAVAILABLE_AFTER: RFC 850 formatted timestamp - Removes an URL from Google’s search index a day after the given date/time

So how can X-Robots-Tags help you better control the content that is indexed by Google? Well you can now tell the Google Bot that you do not want specific non-HTML documents like PDF, Word, and Image documents that you don’t want them cached on the Google Server or that a paper you have released on your website in PDF format should only be good until a specific date. So now you just need to force you server to include an addition X-Robots-Tag in the header which can be done with any of the modern languages and server, the header would look something like this:

Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:41:38 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) PHP/4.4.4
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.4
X-Robots-Tag: index, noarchive, nosnippet
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: application/pdf

You can do this with anything that can be served over HTTP now, so this is a huge boost for any of us control freaks that like to have our content easily organized and controlled on what is searchable on Google.

Tags: Better Coding, Google, Search Engine

Posted in Programming, SEO | | | View blog reactions | No Comments »

A major update has been pushed out for Google Analytics, as described in a post on Google Webmaster:

Webmaster tools from Google are indispensable for people who optimize their site for indexing in Google. Eighteen months ago, Google launched another free tool for webmasters - Google Analytics - which tells you about your visitors and the traffic patterns to your site using a JavaScript code snippet to execute tracking and reporting. This past Tuesday, Google Analytics launched a new version, with an easier-to-use interface that has more intuitive navigation and greater visibility for important metrics. We also introduced some collaboration and customization features such as email reports and custom dashboards.

I simply love this tool, and the data it provides is invaluable to my day to day operations of this website.

Tags: Google, Search Engine

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Last week all the major search engine providers, announced that they were going to support a new specification at sitemap.org that allows them to auto discover your sitemap without you having to submit it:

• Ask
• Google
• Yahoo
• Live

Yahoo did a good job at summing up the advantages to putting your sitemap location in the robots.txt file.

All search crawlers recognize robots.txt, so it seemed like a good idea to use that mechanism to allow webmasters to share their Sitemaps. You agreed and encouraged us to allow robots.txt discovery of Sitemaps on our suggestion board. We took the idea to Google and Microsoft and are happy to announce today that you can now find your sitemaps in a uniform way across all participating engines.

If you want to see my implementation of this for my sitemap go to http://www.coderjournal.com/robots.txt. Further details about this can be found at http://sitemaps.org/protocol.htm or for your convenience I have included them below.

Specifying the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file

You can specify the location of the Sitemap using a robots.txt file. To do this, simply add the following line:

Sitemap: <sitemap_location>

The <sitemap_location> should be the complete URL to the Sitemap, such as: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

This directive is independent of the user-agent line, so it doesn’t matter where you place it in your file. If you have a Sitemap index file, you can include the location of just that file. You don’t need to list each individual Sitemap listed in the index file.

Tags: Ask, Google, Microsoft Live, Search Engine, Yahoo

Posted in SEO | | | View blog reactions | 1 Comment »

For many developers the URL Address is just a means to an end, so very little time is actually spent on creating and planning a URL that is both functional and user friendly. We have all seen the URLs that seem to go on forever, I am not going to dwell on those URLs because you can find them anywhere. I am going to go over what a good URL consists of, and some easy ways to increase your search engine ranking with your already developed application.

Search Engines Crawlers are like People

One thing that a web developer has to understand is that Search Engine Crawlers are like people. Everybody understands that if your site content is not laid out in a way that is readable, people will not spend much time on your site. The same goes for Search Engine Crawlers, if your site doesn’t conform to XHTML or at the very least HTML standards the search engine crawler isn’t going to spend much time indexing your site.

Well the very same goes for the URL of your website, if it is ugly and looks like http://somesite.com/default.aspx?a=0038383-838308380-8383&c=3&p=30203#page-2 it is very hard to determine what part of the URL changes the content displayed and what this content is actually suppose to be. I don’t even think the developer of this application could tell you. But a more friendly version of the same URL might be written like http://somesite.com/authorname/google/correct-use-of-the-url.html#page-2. Just like the content example above, the Search Engine Crawler will have an easier time cataloging the nicer URL because it actually uses real words instead of magic numbers that don’t mean anything except to the program.

3 Tips For Constructing a Proper URL

1. Remove Duplicate URLs
   Jeff Atwood recently wrote an article dealing with multiple URLs and the effects they have on your Search Engine Ranking:

   As a software developer, you may be familiar with the DRY principle: don’t repeat yourself. It’s absolute bedrock in software engineering, and it’s covered beautifully in The Pragmatic Programmer, and even more succinctly in this brief IEEE software article (pdf). If you haven’t committed this to heart by now, go read these links first…

   With URLs there are many ways to get to a website:

   1. http://www.coderjournal.com
   2. http://www.coderjournal.com
   3. http://www.coderjournal.com/index.html
   4. http://www.coderjournal.com/index.html

   Having these multiple URLs reference the same content decreases your Search Engine Ranking, specifically PageRank is calculated per-URL. So the best idea is to do a 301 Redirect for the different patterns I listed above. In my case of Coder Journal I have URLs 2,3,4 all redirecting to URL 1.

2. Combine Domains
   Most people don’t know but this blog has multiple domains that get you to the same point.
   • http://www.coderjournal.com
   • http://coderjournal.net
   • http://coderjournal.org

   Just like what we previously went over about Duplicate URLs the same applies to domain names. So it is wise to also do a 301 Redirect from the domains. In the case of this blog I have the .net and .org domains doing a 301 redirect to my .com domain name.

3. Increasing Your Surface Area With Keywords in URLs
   If you do most any search on Google, you will notice that Google also highlights the keywords that show up in the URL. So a URL that looks like this http://www.coderjournal.com/2007/04/new-novell-ad-campaign-mac-vs-pc-vs-linux-continued/ is going to attract a lot more attention on keyword searches than a URL that looks like http://www.coderjournal.com/2007/04/new-novell-ad-campaign-mac-vs-pc-vs-linux-continued/

The 3 tips that I gave you above are just the tip of the SEO iceberg. However implementing one or all of these should increase your Search Engine Ranking, without effecting the functionality of your application. What more could you ask for?

Tags: Google, Search Engine

Posted in SEO | | | View blog reactions | 1 Comment »

Do you hate having to go to umpteen sites just to download your essential software to get your computer running?
Do you hate then having to again go to umpteen sites again to check for software updates, and then downloading and installing them?

Well I have the answer for you, it is call the Google Pack. Not only does the Google Pack include a wealth of Google software it also includes many non-Google software titles such as, Skype, RealPlayer, Adobe Reader, Norton AntiVirus 2005 SE, Ad-Aware SE Personal, Mozilla Firefox, and all the software is downloaded and installed according to your preferences. And as an added bonus there is a service that runs in the background called Google Updater and it will keep all of the supported installed programs updated to their latest and greatest version. See image to the right for a screen shot of Google Updater.

So if you would like to check out the Google Pack just click the button below:

The following wealth of programs is one of the main reasons I recommend it along with Firefox on the left side of my site.

List of Software in Google Pack

• Google Earth
• Google Desktop
• Picasa
• Google Pack Screensaver
• Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar
• Norton AntiVirus 2005 Special Edition
• Ad-Aware SE Personal
• Adobe Reader
• Google Talk
• Google Video Player
• RealPlayer
• GalleryPlayerHD Images
• Skype

Tags: Acrobat, Adobe, Google, Search Engine

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