Random Stuff LI: Useful Tips Edition
What with being sick for almost a week, and then taking a week and a half of vacation (which I intend to write about someday), I accumulated a prodigious backlog of projects at work, which I'm still struggling to get under control. Consequently, I've fallen behind here as well, and (at least for the present) I can't get back up.
I have, however, in my copious free time discovered how to get my SiteMeter counter to appear (and, therefore, count page hits) whenever someone looks at any page on my LJ-but not when friends see my new posts on their friends pages. Counting the latter is cheating, in my opinion, but until now, the only alternative I knew about was to post my counter to my info page and somewhere on my main (recent posts) page (which meant that I had to periodically adjust the date of this placeholder post)-and that clearly underestimates the traffic on my journal, since people are going to hop directly to any individual post the find via Google, the Skeptics' Circle, etc.
But through a lucky Web search I discovered how to add a Web counter to the LJ sidebar, so that it shows up on any page that invokes my particular journal's style, or "theme," including individual posts (if viewed in my style), collections of posts under a particular tag, and my friends page. Warning: The procedure is not trivial; it requires, in essence, creating a new, custom journal style based on your current one. Arcane programming code is involved (and I'm not even sure which language it is).
If you're really interested in what people are looking at in your LJ, however, you'll gain all sorts of valuable information. After a mere two days' data collection, I've already discovered a surprising fact: that my most popular post, as based on "entry pages" (initial pages viewed during visits to my journal), is this one, lampooning the "Tesla Purple Energy Shield™" scam. Granted, so far I have a total of only 130 visits and 170 total page views, but fully 25 of those 130 visits started at the Tesla Shield entry. I wouldn't have guessed this particular post would get so much traffic. Unfortunately, due to LiveJournal's prohibition on Javascript, I can't see from where people are hopping in. I suspect somebody with a really popular 'blog has linked to it.
Overall I've been pretty happy using SiteMeter as my counter, but recently I've found a probable point of incompatibility between it and LJ. I've set the counter to show the total number of visits (in this case, since a couple days ago), but what I get is a little SiteMeter icon. It's unobtrusive and all, but I'm more interested in seeing the number of visits, which, after all, is why I bother with the counter in the first place. I'm pretty sure it's LJ, and not SiteMeter itself, that's causing the problem because I have an unexpected control group: someone who calls his 'blog "bleen.com" (not the actual URL, though), has mistakenly linked to my counter, and on his page it shows up as intended. It gives my ego a stroke to observe that my 'blog is getting a hell of a lot more traffic than his, but this is tempered by the fact that he hasn't written a post since August 2003.
[Edit: It seems that the reason my counter wasn't showing up properly was that SiteMeter was in the process of completely revamping their site. They have, thankfully, since reverted to the old style.]
Now THIS is performance art. (Link is to a 3-min video.)
Another neat utility I recently unearthed on the Web: the Element Hiding Helper extension to AdBlock Plus for Firefox. So far, it seems to work perfectly to hide the annoying text ads in the new Facebook layout. (I'd already downloaded something to conceal the text ads in GMail, but I forgot what it was. Perhaps it's part of AdBlock Plus proper.)
From the Stupid Aptitude Test in a 1974 special edition of National Lampoon ("The Best of #5"), an analogy question that holds just as true over 30 years later:
PRESIDENT : REPUBLICANS ::
(A) boil : neck
(B) albatross : neck
(C) heat rash : neck
(D) noose : neck
(E) turd : swimming pool
The information that Oprah Winfrey is stumping for Barack Obama has somehow filtered down to me through the huge, crap-laden ocean of popular culture. This news is a source of great relief, for if the middle-aged housewife demographic votes as a bloc, he can hardly lose.
I have, however, in my copious free time discovered how to get my SiteMeter counter to appear (and, therefore, count page hits) whenever someone looks at any page on my LJ-but not when friends see my new posts on their friends pages. Counting the latter is cheating, in my opinion, but until now, the only alternative I knew about was to post my counter to my info page and somewhere on my main (recent posts) page (which meant that I had to periodically adjust the date of this placeholder post)-and that clearly underestimates the traffic on my journal, since people are going to hop directly to any individual post the find via Google, the Skeptics' Circle, etc.
But through a lucky Web search I discovered how to add a Web counter to the LJ sidebar, so that it shows up on any page that invokes my particular journal's style, or "theme," including individual posts (if viewed in my style), collections of posts under a particular tag, and my friends page. Warning: The procedure is not trivial; it requires, in essence, creating a new, custom journal style based on your current one. Arcane programming code is involved (and I'm not even sure which language it is).
If you're really interested in what people are looking at in your LJ, however, you'll gain all sorts of valuable information. After a mere two days' data collection, I've already discovered a surprising fact: that my most popular post, as based on "entry pages" (initial pages viewed during visits to my journal), is this one, lampooning the "Tesla Purple Energy Shield™" scam. Granted, so far I have a total of only 130 visits and 170 total page views, but fully 25 of those 130 visits started at the Tesla Shield entry. I wouldn't have guessed this particular post would get so much traffic. Unfortunately, due to LiveJournal's prohibition on Javascript, I can't see from where people are hopping in. I suspect somebody with a really popular 'blog has linked to it.
Overall I've been pretty happy using SiteMeter as my counter, but recently I've found a probable point of incompatibility between it and LJ. I've set the counter to show the total number of visits (in this case, since a couple days ago), but what I get is a little SiteMeter icon. It's unobtrusive and all, but I'm more interested in seeing the number of visits, which, after all, is why I bother with the counter in the first place. I'm pretty sure it's LJ, and not SiteMeter itself, that's causing the problem because I have an unexpected control group: someone who calls his 'blog "bleen.com" (not the actual URL, though), has mistakenly linked to my counter, and on his page it shows up as intended. It gives my ego a stroke to observe that my 'blog is getting a hell of a lot more traffic than his, but this is tempered by the fact that he hasn't written a post since August 2003.
[Edit: It seems that the reason my counter wasn't showing up properly was that SiteMeter was in the process of completely revamping their site. They have, thankfully, since reverted to the old style.]
Now THIS is performance art. (Link is to a 3-min video.)
Another neat utility I recently unearthed on the Web: the Element Hiding Helper extension to AdBlock Plus for Firefox. So far, it seems to work perfectly to hide the annoying text ads in the new Facebook layout. (I'd already downloaded something to conceal the text ads in GMail, but I forgot what it was. Perhaps it's part of AdBlock Plus proper.)
From the Stupid Aptitude Test in a 1974 special edition of National Lampoon ("The Best of #5"), an analogy question that holds just as true over 30 years later:
PRESIDENT : REPUBLICANS ::
(A) boil : neck
(B) albatross : neck
(C) heat rash : neck
(D) noose : neck
(E) turd : swimming pool
The information that Oprah Winfrey is stumping for Barack Obama has somehow filtered down to me through the huge, crap-laden ocean of popular culture. This news is a source of great relief, for if the middle-aged housewife demographic votes as a bloc, he can hardly lose.