Traffic analysis is one of the most important parts of understanding your sites and its readers. Im a firm believer that sites and blogs need to really get to know their audience and offer them whatever they want.
GoSquared has launched their new LiveStats product in which they are trying to combined with their exsiting SellAds and GetSeen products. LiveStats is a real-time traffic monitoring app for small and medium sized websites. If you head over to http://gosquared.com, you can signup and then add your site. Once accepted you will be able to see in real time users visiting your site and their basic information.
Information available includes:
Browser
Country
Operating System
URL
Enterance Source
There are a few additional options, but instead of running through everything I just thought I would add their introduction video:
Photoshop software can be expensive – especially considering that most of us don’t use it that often. Obviously the industry standard is Adobe Photoshop. This program has been a cornerstone in image editing and photography for years now. However, I’d like to share with the Crenk readers a great freeware Photoshop program that’s just as good – if not better because…well… it’s free!
At the minute, GIMP is in version 2.6 and is available to download here.
It has photo enhancement, a fully customizable interface, barrel distortion, digital retouching, great hardware support, numerous file formats and the ability to run on pretty much any OS.
Here are a couple of screenshots from GIMP:
So for all you artists, photographers and inquisitive geeks out there – GIMP.
Allmyapps makes software installation a breeze. No matter how many applications you need, 1 click is all you need to have all your favorite applications installed on your PC. Allmyapps also keeps your applications safe! Would you need to reinstall your system, Allmyapps takes care of reinstalling all your favorite applications in the blink of an eye.
With Allmyapps, installing software applications has become so easy that you’ll soon find yourself installing a lot of great new applications! Be prepared to enjoy your computer like never before! Allmyapps provides some great application ideas that I have never even heard of, but I’m sure they can make me a lot more product, but on the other side there are a lot of time killers out there!
Mozilla team is working really hard on brainstorming the idea and design of Firefox 3.7 (currently in 3.5, 3.6 it’s just around the corner). What’s the main idea? Hide the Menu bar and use a very similar look-n-feel of Office 2007/Office 2010 Ribbon.
They are using their Wiki to give us some of the advances made so far, the ideas floating in the air and of course receive feedback from most of the Mozilla lovers (and non-lovers as well, why not?). And here are the ideas that they have so far:
Embracing Glass: Toolbar and Tabs using Glass. Raised translucent buttons that are slightly glossy to meld with the toolbar. Raised 3D look to achieve tactile “feel”.
Neutral Tones: Overall neutral color scheme that can transition among platforms. Can remain attractive and slick without fighting for focus from web content.
Hiding the Menu Bar: Hiding the menubar by default (on Vista/7) allows us to use Glass, free up vertical space and retain platform consistency.
Page and Tools Buttons: Condense and trim existing menu structure into two buttons “Page” and “Tools”. Similar to Safari and Chrome.
Combine Stop/Reload: Combine Stop and Reload into one button. Reduces visual “clutter” and combines two buttons that have mutually exclusive functionality.
Home Button/Tab: Remove “Home” Button from default toolbar. Move functionality to a “Home Tab” containing your homepage.
Personally I think those are very nice and significant changes. Office, Vista and 7 seems that they are setting the standards of any UI (no surprise there, Windows will still be the world’s main OS for a few years more). But the good news is that Mozilla it is also trying to establish browsers standards, like the “Page and Tools Buttons” that is a common feature in Safari and Chrome.
And also the “Combine Stop/Reload” feature it is something that I’ve been waiting to see in Firefox for a long time. I know, it’s a very tiny thing, but don’t you love having the same functionality in different browsers?
And what are the other changes that you would include?
Readtwit is a 3-step service that will seamlessly integrates this aggregation power of the people you follow – into your RSS reader.
Readtwit, a new web service by Lionite does one simple thing – it captures weblinks from your Twitter stream and then publishes the content as an RSS feed. You can then use any feed reading application to read it.
Head over to ReadTwit and hit the ‘Get Fed’ button
Choose your RSS reader (and if it’s not there click the ‘Get me the feed‘ button and paste the feed into your reader)
Readtwit automatically prevents content duplication caused by retweets. It does that by grouping together similar links that are sent in the same time-frame. Once you’ve set up your RSS feed, you can further tweak Readtwit to prevent (or at least minimize) information overload.
First, you can filter out specific users. This feature will help you keep focused on useful content, as you can set it to not display links by people who post too much (and also exclude yourself, in order to not get back the links you post, as retweets).
Right, those of you who read my twitter will know that I’ve decided it’s time to get into shape. I’m by no means obese. However I would like to be able to jog for five minutes without needing to stop ten times for ten-minute breaks.
I put some good play lists on my Mp3, dug the tracky bottoms out of the wardrobe (oh, the shame) and put on the stopwatch. Then it dawned on me – I don’t know the first thing about getting fit. Therefore, I did what anyone in their right mind would do – I Googled.
After sifting through dozens of brutal websites, I came across a few military style sites when it clicked – surely, armies across the world must have SOMETHING! This article is a list of the top three Army websites of real world militaries about getting fit. These cool web apps and videos will hopefully have me in ship shape in no time.
1. The Royal Commandos: This section of their website is dedicated to getting you fit in a short space of time in order to gain entry to them. There are tons of videos showing you how to do the exercises properly, what you should eat and what makes a good schedule. Because it’s from one of the world best fighting forces where physical fitness is of top priority during training, you know you’re not getting the wimpy approach. Easy to use and tones of information on there.
2. 62nd Infantry .com – This is an unofficial website run by the 62nd Infantry Battalion of the Irish Reserve Defense Forces. It focuses less on interactive features and more on the training side of things, which I liked. There are charts to figure out your BMI, motivation techniques, goals and targets. Although this is aimed at meeting fitness levels to gain entry for training, it can be used by the average Joe to shed the pounds.
3. Canadian Army. This site doesn’t go into to much detail like the previous two sites, but it does give you some good step-by-step instructions and some goals for joining which you can use as personal targets.
There has been a lot of news from Skype lately, Skype new headset, Skype Windows and iPhone improvements, and Skype 4.0 release. Just to jump on the bandwagon Skype has now released their 2.8 version for the Mac. This new version brings two totally new and unique features namely Screen sharing and Skype Access.
Screen Sharing is a key new feature in Skype client for the Mac which allows one easily to see/share all or a portion of their desktop with another Skype user during a call. And for those on the move, Skype Access allows them to pay for Wi-Fi hotspots using their credit.
More new features include:
Improved chat management
Quick Add
Mood message chat
Larger profile pictures
Hidden avatars in incoming contact requests
Add notes to contacts
To download this new version of Skype, simply head over to the Skype website.
There’s nothing new if I say that the exponential growth from Internet made the data available for all of us a little bit harder to handle; and of course you can feel this consequence directly with your feeds. FeedStitch tries to simplify that by giving you the chance to unify your common feeds into one.
Using this web app it’s very simple, you only need the feeds URL, add them, and create the category. After that, you can visualize the entries directly from one place and as viewing a blog. You don’t even have to register, you can use any of these accounts to login and create your FeedStitch: Gmail, Twitter, Yahoo!, Facebook, AOL and openID.
Besides the Firefox Add-On official site, where anyone can download/upload the add-ons and share it with the community; you can also find Mozdev.org where there are over 250 projects related to Mozilla that are actively in motion by several developers in the mission to “establish Mozilla as a viable application development platform”.
On this list you’ll find very, very useful tools that you can install to improve your browsing experience: Integration with Thunderbird, FTP client, autocopy highlighted text, proxy configurations, RSS reader, etc etc.
Again, another open source project that shows a lot of maturity, adding value and constant improvement. Cheers to that
Today I came across a very interesting marketplace, Gazhoo. Gazhoo is a marketplace to buy and sell documents, images, templates and more. Gazhoo seems to have everything from venture capital documents to a stock standard business agreement.
Gazhoo is a great marketplace for business professional who don’t have too much experience in the industry but are trying to get something started. Gazhoo allows users to view half of the document for free in a simple window very similar to Docstoc. Once you have viewed the document and made sure it is the one you want, then you are able to purchase at an affordable price from their very simple marketplace. Prices vary depending upon the document, but they start at about $5.00.
So if you are looking for affordable secure documents then head over to Gazhoo. However, make sure you still have them looked over by a lawyer if you are planning on releasing after your own moderations.
BlogBackupr it’s a simple and nice web app that automatically backups all your posts in your blog. It represents a very easy way for you to not worry so much about vulnerabilities in the platform, loosing data, accidental deletion, etc.
It works with all blogs that have RSS-feed, that is the minimum requirement. Among the features that you can find in this web app:
Completely free.
No installation required.
Once you register, the backups are performed regularly without requiring your intervention.
You can export and import all those backups whenever you want.
Automatic restore supported for WordPress.org, WordPress.com and Blogger.com
WordPress users include these backups: full posts, comments, pages, categories and media.
You can have backups without giving your WordPress credentials. Will just use the public feed.
CSS file and images from the blog template are also saved.
This is your administration site where you can execute all necessary tasks with the added blogs:
The main differences are related in bugs fixing about the previous version. Here are some of them:
Translation of role names fixed
wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
Upload error messages are now correctly reported
Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
Switched back to curl as the default transport
Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload
To see all tickets that were fixed from Beta 1, check this link. I really enjoy watching this kind of transparency in projects, where you can give your feedback, insert about a bug and see the evolution about it: owner, priority, state.