Web – Page 3 – Something Odd!

Porn on your iPhone

Acting on what Matt blogged, I searched my logs for “iPhone” and found a few interesting entries. Looks like iPhone users are using the Internet for what everyone else uses it for. Searching for nice boobs:

xx.xxx.xx.xxx – – [08/Jul/2007:03:49:05 +0000] “GET /tag/nice-boobs/ HTTP/1.1” 200 7786 “http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=nice+boobs&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8” “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CP
U like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3”

I wonder how well that small screen will display them?

Dofollowing links in comments and trackbacks

I’ve just installed the Do Follow Trackback and Do Follow Comments plugins so now the links in your comments and trackbacks will be ~~stalked~~ followed by Google and any other search engine or service that know about the rel='nofollow' link attribute.

It’s not a completely free lunch though. Any spam comments will be deleted, legitimate comments with spammy urls will have their URLs mangled. Check out this comment and this one. Those _ characters in the urls make them pretty useless.

There are 7,457 comments on over 4,500 posts here. That’s a lot of URLs to get some PR loving.

The change is active here on Holy Shmoly! and In Photos dot org.

Do Text Link Ads use Text Link Ads?

The front page of Text Link Ads doesn’t have any text link ads, and neither does their blog. The blog has “Auction Ads” adverts there instead.

Matt Cutts warned that sites selling links would be penalised by Google. I wonder if that has anything to do with it?

Dump Javascript at the end of your page

You’ve seen it plenty of times before. A website loads but only the sidebar appears. The loading graphic in your browser is still spinning and there’s that “contacting …” or “loading …” message at the bottom of your window. Why?

The most common cause of this is because the site uses a chunk of Javascript loaded from a remote site. Think of those fancy chat widgets, Snap.com popups and even hit counters. If those sites are slow to load, they could make your site slow too. The best place to put that code is right at the bottom of the page, after all the content, if you can and it’s appropriate.

I just noticed this happening on Pro Blogger a few minutes ago. Darren’s c2.gostats.com stats are loaded just below the sidebar and because that site was responding slowly the main content part of his blog didn’t display immediately. This may be a storm in a teacup because the next time I refreshed it loaded fine but remember, first impressions count. You don’t want to keep a new visitor to your site waiting.

The ever pervasive Snap.com seems to suffer this sort of problem on a regular basis so be extra careful when you use their Javascript applet. If it takes a while to load, so will your blog.

To further confuse matters, there’s also a bug in Firefox that makes the “Transferring data from …” message appear longer than it should. The guys at Sphere noticed this after complaints their Javascript was loading slowly. It’s all a bit of a mess really!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

Desktop Tower Defense should be banned

Desktop Tower Defense could be the most addictive game I’ve played in a while, which is why you should not play it. Never, really, don’t go there. Or if you do, play it now and get it out of your system before you go back to work on Monday.

It’s rather good. I’d write more but I’m in the middle of a game…

Later .. Two days later Michael Arrington says exactly the same as me. Thanks Donal for the heads up! I’d like to think that he read it here but I suspect the only thing we share are our sentiments about this addictive game.