It’s confession time. Firstly, I have a blog. Secondly, it has a very high bounce rate. Now I’m not trying to make money from blogging or anything like that, but I do shed a small tear when I think: “Most people stop by for a quick visit, and then leave without looking around.”
Now there are a lot of articles out there that give pointers on how optimize your blog/site to reduce bounce rate, so I’m not even going to try and talk about that here. If you are after a good source of information, however, I’d recommend checking out problogger. What I am going to talk about though, is how you can use Google Analytics to determine where to focus your efforts. Google Analytics is very good at showing your overall bounce rate, but you can get more detail and start targeting particular posts and keywords to reduce that bounce rate.
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posted on the February 6th, 2010 No Comments »
Living life with depression in my own words, “sucks arse”. I do generally try to keep my language clean, but I have no other way to really describe the condition. Certainly not in my case at least. Today is the third day in a row that I have been away from work due to depression.
While I have always attempted to be as open as possible with my managers (given the impact the condition has on them), I have found it much more difficult to be open about things with my peers and people who work for me. Well today, I just chose to tell it how it was, and I honestly think that was the best thing to do. That does, however, mean I need to be this open with everyone so I am not putting others in a difficult situation of knowing something about me that is not widely known.
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posted on the January 18th, 2010 21 Comments »
The amount of discussion that has gone on projecting twitter’s demise based on “stalled growth” is very interesting. I think this particular example demonstrates very well that current competitive analysis techniques used for web business are broken and failing to deliver the information genuinely needed.
I believe the web is currently informationally, functionally and economically constrained from further evolution.
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posted on the January 13th, 2010 1 Comment »
Well it’s 2010, and I definitely had a distractable end to 2009 (with a distinct lack of blogging). So to kick off 2010, I thought I’d start trying to get a few of the “low hanging fruit” ideas that I’ve had over the last six months written and working.
The first of those will be an experiment using Google’s AppEngine as a front-end proxy to a less robust website, hosted on low-cost hosting. Whilst not sure, I’ve got a feeling that I’ll be able to give my self-hosted wordpress blog a layer of resilience with some app-engine mem-caching goodness.
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posted on the January 10th, 2010 No Comments »
With last week’s release of Sidewiki, there have been a quite a few discussions around whether it is a good or bad thing for blogs and sites in general. Whether it is the right way to go about implementing a global commenting system, etc, etc.
Whether it is or isn’t doesn’t really worry too much – my thoughts are around what can be done with the API.
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posted on the September 28th, 2009 No Comments »
I actually had to make a new article category to capture the coolness of this great new web application. It pretty much gets a tick in the box for each of the criteria on the “Super Cool WebApp” checklist (which admittedly I am only just formally noting down now).
So what is Thounds? Well read on…
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posted on the September 16th, 2009 No Comments »
OK. My head is about to explode – which isn’t that uncommon when you are as distractable as I am. The reason for my head about to explode this time is that I have now discovered a fourth web technologies based (html, css, javascript) framework for developing iPhone (and Android usually) applications. To be frank, I am struggling for time to do a “deep-dive” into each of these frameworks so would appreciate hearing some opinions about what to use.
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posted on the September 10th, 2009 14 Comments »
Man, Gist is good. It’s basically the tool you have been waiting for to help you get on top of noise that is social media.
I would say that noise is pretty much deafening, not deafening in the way that makes you want to lock yourself in a room (well sometimes maybe) – maybe noise is not the right word. It is more like the deafening you experience when you go to a concert or gig and everything else just seems to disappear. When you are busy networking, other goals and objectives can simply cease to be…
So how does Gist help?
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posted on the September 6th, 2009 2 Comments »
If you are anything like me you have been tempted by iPhone development on a number of occasions, but you don’t currently have the time or tools available to get started. Well now there is a great toolset available for web developers who would prefer to spend their time with web technologies like Google AppEngine and jQuery rather than the likes of Objective C.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place for native iPhone (and other smartphone development) but in terms I strongly believe that jQTouch will enable a large majority of applications to be built using web tools, and provide that iPhone look and feel.
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posted on the September 1st, 2009 1 Comment »
I’m currently on a quest for a desktop environment that is lean enough to run on my MSI Wind netbook, but scales up nicely to a multi-monitor desktop environment. Now I’ve sucessfully installed Ubuntu on the netbook but haven’t really taken the next step on getting it running the various programming environments I’m used to working with. Currently I’m stuck in a world of a heavyweight IDE (eclipse) that really doesn’t scale well to the small screen of the netbook.
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posted on the July 8th, 2009 1 Comment »
