I’m constantly looking for a nice, quick and easy blog stats. Google Analytics is a great program, but it’s a bit complex for my daily checks. I’ve tried quite a few and recently Performancing Metrics came back online. It’s not really a new service, but it is a great step forward.

Performancing Metrics now uses Clicky stats as its core. It wasn’t built from the ground up, but rather re-branded. I’m not sure what it offers as unique, but regardless, it’s still a nice stats program with the promises of unique features yet to come.

So what makes Performancing Metrics different? Well it’s more about what is happening now then rather aggregating data. It’s great for seeing what’s happening today, but not great for finding out what happened over the past month.

The dashboard shows incoming links, unique visitors, searches and top content. None of it is older than today and it’s a nice overview.

Digging into the analytics a bit you can get visitor information like country, web browser, screen size and OS among others. The actions tab will let you see the visitor’s information including the time and date, what they clicked on, the web browser and OS they used and referring information. It’ll even count downloads, outbound links and FeedBurner subscribers.

Think you have what it takes to critique websites? Think to many sites are over done, don’t think about usability or are just to cluttered? Well now is your chance to get your opinion out there by becoming a WebAward judge.

The WebAward competition judges hundreds of sites from 96 different industries. As a judge, you’ll get a variety of sites to check out and report back on. It’s a great opportunity to not only see some cool sites that you may not run across normally, but you can also give feedback to those that need a little bit of help.

To signup, fill out the WebAward judge nomination form and good luck!

[tags]webaward[/tags]

With the recent announcement of the slimmed down version of Technorati, s.technorati.com, my use of the blog search engine is on the increase once again. Now I’ve made it even easier to access by creating sTechnorati.

sTechnorati is a search plugin that works in both IE7 and Firefox 2. It’s actually built with the OpenSerch technology so as browsers adopt to that, they too can install sTechnorati. What it will do is install an option to search from your browsers built in search box and go directly to the s.technorati.com search results page. Just like the Google option that is already there now.

While making sTechnorati I took a few liberties. It’s set to search only English posts and posts with at least a little authority. I felt that would bring back the best results. If you want one with different settings, just ask and I’ll toss a new one together.

Enjoy!

Install sTechnorati

[tags] technorati,firefox,ie7,opensearch[/tags]

So guess what happens when you post to fast and don’t read all the details? You feel like an idiot.

One of my biggest complaints about Technorati is that I love blog search, but don’t need all the social media elements. Photos, audio and video just aren’t want I want to see. I wrote that the new Technorati is nice, but to over done for me. Guess what, they already knew that people felt that way and built a striped own version.

http://s.technorati.com is nothing but blog search. Quick, uncluttered and simple. A big thanks goes out to the Technorati crew for this!

Now the only thing that Google still has is the ability to search by date (past hour, day, week, month, custom) and yet sort by relevance or date. But now I guess I’m just being picky.

I’ve been a big fan of Technorati since the beginning, but once it tried to become the ‘one stop shop’ for social media search, I’ve strayed. I don’t care about videos, pictures and audio. I really want just a good blog search. So I switched to Google Blog Search. With the new design though, my want to use Technorati is coming back.

One big reasons for leaving, other than all the extra social stuff, was that when I subscribed to an RSS feed, it kept telling me the some post was new every time I checked my feeds. I haven’t signed up for any new Technorati feeds lately as Google Blog Search has that down.

My other big issue use to be how slow it was, or how it kept erroring out, during searches. It’s nice to see that with the recent re-launch, the site search speed seems better. However, the search results are still not working correctly.

I did a blog search for toprankblog and came up with 47 blogs and 5 pages of search results. However, when I get to page 2, I get only one result. When I get to page 3, I get “There are no Technorati blogs about toprankblog.” For some reason, Technorati only shows 11 out of 47 blog results.

Mariner Software is getting ready to release their new blogging client called WinJournal. If you’ve used a Mac, then you may be familiar with MacJournal. Well it’s the same idea, just for Windows users.

WinJournal aims to bring journaling, blogging and podcasting into one application. Its blogging capabilities tie into MovableType, TypePad, Wordpress, Live Journal, Blogger and Windows Spaces. You can even publish your entries to a web server via FTP. Not sure if that includes an RSS feed or not, but it does sound like a great option. Or you can just use WinJournal write your own entries that don’t get published.

Some of the other options include wiki style links, spell check, auto save, security/encryption, WYSIWYG text editor, calendar, multiple journals, labels, full screen mode and tabs. There is also a skins manager to change the look an feel of WinJournal. This is good as the default skin under XP isn’t good. I switched it to WLM and it is much nicer.

Overall, it looks as if WinJournal has a lot of nice features. The folks over at MarinerSoftware are working hard on creating a quality desktop blog client and it’s well on its way.

There are lots of good posts out there that I don’t have time to dive into right how. But I wanted to share. Here are the ones I’ve seen recently.

Keeping your Wordpress alive during a traffic storm
Using the WP-Cache plugin actually creates a static version of your pages so that the strain on the server becomes much less when traffic spikes.

Since Lifehacker seems to like Tumblr, now I think I have to check it out.  Have you tumbled before? Supposedly it’s like blogging, only easier???

Web 2.0 Awards are out! Included are all sorts of great services from social bookmarking to task management, travel and much more.

Weebly launched. It’s a new hosted blogging platform like Blogger.com or Wordpress.com.

Google Reader for the Wii! I haven’t had time to check it out yet, but it’s definitely on my to-do list.

Wordpress has launched an official stats plugin named Automattic Stats. It a stats plugin that ties into Wordpress.com to track your visitors and works well, but it’s not available for everyone.

One of the Wordpress.com exclusive features is the ability to get blog and feed stats in your dashboard. Everything from the number feed reads to incoming links, keywords, clicks and top posts. A great feature that was sadly missing from anyone who installed Wordpress on their own servers. That was until recently when the Automattic Stats plugin was released.

The plugin is a snap to install. Just upload the file into your plugins directory, then put in your Wordpress.com API. Yes, you need one of those. If you use Akismet, then you already have one and don’t need another. If you don’t have one, signup for a Wordpress.com account and they’ll give you one. After that, just sit back and wait for your stats to roll in.

There are a few downsides to the stats plugin though. The main one being that it’s not integrated into your Wordpress install. You have to go to your Wordpress.com dashboard to actually see your stats. It does add a tab on your dashboard screen though, so it’s only a click away.

The FeedBurner plugin has got a new name and a new owner. Steve Smith from OrderedList.com handed off the plugin to the FeedBuner crew. It wasn’t a multi-million dollar deal like you hear with internet companies these days, but FeedBurner did rename the plugin in Steve’s honor. It’s now the FeedSmith plugin.

If you’re not familular with the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin, what it does is automatically reidrects your Wordpress’ feeds to the FeedBurner version. You don’t need to update your template or give out your FeedBurner URL, just update the setting via your Wordpress admin and it’ll do the rest. Quite handy and works well.  It’s a must install on my list.

Congrats to Steve!

[tags]FeedBurner,FeedSmith[/tags]

One of my favorite designers (that I only know about due to his blog) is Jon Hicks and he’s just released an amazing Google Reader theme.

The theme cleans up Googles interface so that it makes a better use of the space and polishes it up quite a bit. Jon has re-worked Bloglines in the past and was hoping he’d re-work Google Reader eventually. I tried to create a custom theme for Google Reader once, but gave up a short time later. My CSS skills are good, but Jon’s are amazing.

The Google Reader theme is Mac like (which is one reason why I really like it) and very professional looking. A great makeover!

You can download the files and the install instructions from hicksdesign and have a fancy looking Google Reader in no time.

[tags]google,google-reader,css,hicksdesign[/tags]