Welcome Dublin!

It’s now easier than ever to use Google Analytics thanks to the interface revamp it’s gone through. Michele had the scoop yesterday and I’m very impressed. From your dashboard you can drill down to various aspects of your website’s traffic.

One of those is a clickable map of the world that eventually led me to the following map of Ireland. That’s a lot of traffic from Dublin, but it’s probably something to do with the way Internet traffic in the country is routed. That, or the fact that a quarter of the population live there. Welcome Dublin people to Holy Shmoly!

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A few days ago I listed the keywords people use to visit my site but now it’s easier to find that information and dig deeper into archived traffic stats. Inside the new Analytics interface, go to “Traffic Sources” where you’ll find “Top Traffic Sources”. Click on the keywords for pretty graphs!

Update! Some people aren’t happy with the new upgrade. Chris Silver Smith thinks it’s a downgrade from the old interface.

A day of happy and sad

A year ago today I married the most amazing and wonderful woman I know, Jacinta. She’s the love of my life, beautiful, caring, sensitive and the mother of our son Adam. She is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

We had planned an anniversary lunch and Adam had been changed for the umpteenth time, ready for the trip, but then we found out that Jacinta’s sister Gerarda had passed away peacefully in her sleep during the night. Life has been turned upside down.

Turning Japanese – a song Gerry and Jacinta went mad dancing to in the front garden to annoy a neighbour!

WordPress.com stats for your own blog

Andy announced a new WordPress stats plugin that uses the polished WordPress.com traffic graphs on your own self-hosted WordPress blog. I’ve been testing it here for the past few months and it’s worked fine. I must download the new plugin and install it to see what other goodies Andy has added since.

Eventually I’ll get around to releasing my own referrers plugin, but as our newborn Adam is taking up so much of our time it might be a while before I get around to it!

Take a hint Mary Harney!

I’ve previously written at length about Mary Harney and my distaste for what she’s doing to the health service in Ireland so this image posted to Blogorrah made me smile.

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There’s a general election on May 24th but I thought Harney would be retiring after her disgraceful stint as Minister for Health. It came as a shock that she’s actually standing in the election!

To see more of Mary Harney be sure to check out the cartoons on Langerland!

Top 10 dodgy website keywords

Would that be the top 10 keywords for a dodgy website, or top 10 dodgy keywords for a website?

It would be the latter actually. Thanks to the Keyword Rreport in Google Analytics I found out what the most searched for terms that brought people to Holy Shmoly! were and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

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At least “cgwd” is a Linux word.

There is a positive side to this however. A lot of keywords are used to find this blog. The top ten are only a small slice of the pie so even though those keywords drive a lot of traffic here they are not the main sources it.

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I found out about the Google Analytics Keyword Report through this post via James who kindly linked to my previous post!

What are the top ten keywords for your blog?

Please type my name

I just had a thought after filling in an anti-spam keyword in a comment form. Sometimes my thoughts are interesting but this isn’t one of them. Justin Mason asks you to type his first name as a means to defeat spam bots. I bet if I did the same, even going so far as writing my name next to the box people would misspell it. “donnacha”, “donacha”, “doncha” and “dunacha” are all variations I’ve seen. You don’t want to know how Sky Digital butchered it!

For extra fun I could have an audio clip saying my name instead. I might not ever receive a comment ever again!

Jacinta and Adam came home from the hospital yesterday, my brain is lightly fried, with chips and tomato sauce. Thank you so much Mairead for making us dinner and minding Adam so we could get a short rest! Aren’t family great?

What the heck is that RSS thing anyway?

I’m not going to explain it but a short video I found on Conor’s blog will. It’s produced by Common Craft and explains in easy to understand terms why and how this stuff can make your online life so much more efficient and fun. When you’re done watching the video, click on the Subscribe link over on the sidebar and subscribe to my blog to see how easy it is! You’ll never look back after you discover the power of RSS syndication!

And one final tip, if you’re following the comments on a blog post, you can subscribe to that post so you’ll be notified when a new comment appears! Say you don’t like cats, well my 8 reasons to hate cats post would be right up your alley. It seems to be very popular for some reason. Instead of refreshing the same page over and over again, look for the “Feed for this entry” link and subscribe to it. The cat-hating conversation appears in your news reader along with all your other feeds!
PS. I love cats!

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