Tracking your visitors - web statistics

Trekking walking in the vineyards. Pommard village with church. Pommard, Cote de Beaune, d'Or, Burgundy, France

As a consequence of one of the previous posts on the redesign of this blog I had a question on statistics from someone who reads this blog (at least occasionally). I take the liberty to repeat the question and my comments here. I thought it could be interesting for more people:

Spurred on by your blog post where you compared WP and Blogger and mentioned this, I signed up to StatCounter and have even paid them for extra logs (on [the main site the writer operates] there are 1000s of pages hence it’s needed!). I’m finding the stats quite different to Google Analytics, for my main site it’s about 1/3rd higher on Unique visitors on average though not directly linear. On the other hand, for my WP blog it’s about 50% lower that the stats WP provides (but that doesn’t specifically mention Unique Visitors I don’t think).  What’s your experience? Which is more accurate/quotable on ‘unique users’?

I use both StatCounter and Google Analytics. StatCounter since very long. It’s easy to use and to understand. Much easier to understand than Google Analytics. Perhaps Google Analytics gets more use friendly once you’ve spent days and days digging into it. One tip: if you want to track some specific pages, create a special StatCounter project for it, with its own code, and put that on the specific page(s) you want to track (in addition to the general code – but I assume you put that in the footer).

Google Analytics and StatCounter does give different stats. I’ve read various comments on it but nothing conclusive. The basic problem is that there is no single and reliable way to collect statistics. Both StatCounter and GA use cookies, but they use them differently. Hence they get different results. Some comments say that the difference may be due to Google Analytics being more effective in NOT counting visits by spiders / web crawlers than StatCounter. Counting spiders inflates the stats (it’s not real people). Not sure if that’s true because some say that Google Analytics may give higher stats in some occasions.

I don’t think it’s much of an issue. I would say both are accurate. As accurate as you can get. Stats is in any case a rather nebulous area. E.g. what is “a unique visitor”? If I remember right StatCounter defines it by a cookie that has a 30 minute life time (you can chose to change that). If the same visitor comes back more than 30 minutes later it counts as a new visitor. I am not sure exactly what Google Analytics defines it as but I would think it’s similar.

The most important thing with stats is not the absolute numbers (albeit those are good for marketing purposes) but rather:
-    Trends: growth and fall in traffic. (Light-hearted example: a web site, not to be named, claimed that they had a lot of professional visitors since the traffic was higher in weekdays than on weekends… Hmmm. More likely, people surf for private things at work.)
-    Where visitors come from (originating sites)
-    Popular pages: which are those? Why do you think those particular pages are popular?
-    Keywords: which keywords do people search on in search engines when they find your site
-    And more

All of that an much more is in both StatCounter and Google Analytics. Use both and then decide which you like best. Or continue using both. It’s not expensive, but very informative.

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Blog and Facebook problem

Anyone who might have a clue what the problem is?

Since I changed template on this blog, and modified some other things (installed new widgets) whenever I “post to Facebook” something from this blog Facebook does not recognise and post the photo.

Previously, each time I posted something to Facebook, e.g. using the AddThis widget at the end of each post Facebook picked up the photo from the post and put it in my new Facebook entry. But that no longer works. Facebook doesn’t post any photo at all when I send something to it from this blog.

[UPDATE] It seems that it has something to do with the new template I am using, Webnolia (info and code here) but I can't figure out what might be causing the issue. (I tested if it might have been the TweetMeme widget and it was not. Nor is it  the LinkWithin widget since I use it on another blog, The BKWine Brief Blog, and it does not have this issue. That blog uses a standard Blogger template. [END]

Anyone has a clue as to what might be the problem?

[UPDATE 2:] This is really strange. To trouble shoot this Facebook-Blogger problem I created a new test blog with the Webnolia templat. Posting to Facebook from that blog worked fine. The image thumbnail from the blog posted fine on FB. Why??? I don't know. So I started adding all widgets/gadgets and (the very few) code changes I had on my real blog to the test blog to see what widget messed things up. Nothing. It all worked fine. Why??? I don't know.

What to do now? Well, I thought that one way to find out what was the problem would be to rebuild the (old) real Wine Picture blog and test it at every single step. I saw no other way to figure out what was the problem. (I had read in detail both the templates last night and could see nothing wrong.)

So I started rebuilding... And voila - after rebuilding the "real" blog from scratch it works. I have no clue, NO CLUE, why it didn't work before. But now, after having done all the work once again (much quicker this time of course) it works fine. It's probably magic involved somewhere.

Having done that I took the opportunity to add some improvements:

I changed the link design from "underline" to "dashed unerline". That's done with a css attribute:

You get an underline on links by default. If you don't want an underline you can specify:
a {text-decoration: none;}

But not using any underline at all is bad user interface management. Instead, I preferred to change to something less of an eye-sore than the underline: a dotted underline. (You can also do dashed.)

This is how you can do a dotted underline (if you know WHERE to do it in the CSS):

.post-body p a, .post-body p a:visited {
color: $mainLinkColor;
/* Change, OLD text-decoration: underline; */
text-decoration: none;
border-bottom-width: 1px;
border-left-width: 0px;
border-right-width: 0px;
border-top-width: 0px;
border-style: dotted;
/* Change END */
}

That's the section in the Webnolia template that needed to be changed.

I also introduced the same dotted underline in the sidebars, but only on "hoover". There are so many links in the side bar and the font is relatively small, so it would have been cluttered with a normal (or dotted) permanent underline.

[But there are still mysteries. Why, for example, does this post get full underlines instead of dotted ones? http://wine-pictures.blogspot.com/2010/02/blogger-vs-wordpress-comparison-of-blog.html]

Enough on this for today.

[By the way, here's a useful generator of hex codes to get the colour scheme right when modifying the colours in the template.]

WELL, WELL,WELL, here I am tinking I have resolved the FB-blogger problem. I've redone everything and tested at every single step, and it worked. And now when I post from the blog to FB, with todays Banyuls post .......... it does not work.

I GIVE UP.

FOR NOW.

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Blogger vs. Wordpress - a comparison of blog platforms

The recent blog redesign made me think a bit of the differences – advantages and drawbacks – of Blogger (blogspot.com) vs. Wordpress. Here are a few more comments. It is important to keep in mind that I am talking about Wordpress.com, i.e. the free version of Wordpress, hosted by Wordpress (don't confuse this with Wordpress.org, which offers the same platform, but without the hosting). Also, I am not trying to make any exhaustive comparison, just a few comments.

Both Wordpress and Blogger offer two excellent and completely free blogging platforms. Both can be “enhanced” if you pay a bit extra with e.g. personal domain names (url:s).

Perhaps the easiest thing to see in terms of differences is that it is easier to get a nice looking, well designed blog with Wordpress (Wordpress.com). This is mainly because in Wordpress you have more themes to choose from and they are generally better designed than the Blogger ones. In Blogger most themes look rather terrible.

On the other hand, you have much more flexibility in Blogger to customize a theme once you’ve installed it, changing colours, fonts etc. Wordpress does not allow you to tinker with the themes.

One of the things I discovered in my Wine Picture Blog redesign project was that it wasn’t actually all that difficult to install a new, nice-looking theme (I was almost going to say Wordpress-looking) theme. In Blogger you can install new themes, either from Blogger, or ones that you’ve done yourself, or from a third party. You can’t do that in Wordpress. This, in my view, overcomes one of the main disadvantages with Blogger (the sometimes childish built-in theme collection).

Another big difference is that with Wordpress you can build sites, not just blogs. Perhaps you can do that with Blogger too, but I have not seen it. This means that a Wordpress blog/site doesn’t have to look like a blog with new posts in a time chronology. You can build a site with static pages and a menu structure without it looking the least like a blog. Or you can do a mix of the two. This is a very good way of building a simple site. It does take some figuring out to understand exactly how to do the static pages and the front page, but once you’ve done that it is really easy to build the site. Here are two sites I’ve done in Wordpress:

• Vine Growing and Wine Making
• Languedoc Wines

This is also reflected in that Wordpress has a very different “back office” or management and admin pages than Blogger.

In Wordpress you get some built-in stats. It has its own statistics package that is part of their control panel. But it’s very basic. On the other hand, there’s no such thing at all in Blogger (of course, they want you to use Google Analytics instead). But what you really should do, both in Wordpress and in Blogger is install a separate statistics solution. I use two which are both very good: StatCounter, which is free with a limited log history and costs a small amount if you want to store more logs; and Google Analytics, which is free but a bit more difficult to understand. I strongly recommend using a stats package so you can learn from who your visitors are.

There’s an annoying limitation in Wordpress: it does not accept flash embeds. So you can’t pick up an “embed code” and put it on a Wordpress blog. On this blog (Wine Pictures) all the photo slide shows are flash embeds (from my Photoshelter BKWine Photography site). They are impossible to use on Wordpress.com. They say it is for security reasons. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is a way to encourage you to upgrade to a paying service. One of the most common flash embeds today are YouTube videos. In principle you can’t embed those on Wordpress either, but they’ve done a ‘fix’ so you can actually embed YouTube videos via a video module (that is built in). Quite an annoying limitation. Blogger has no such qualms about flash embeds.

Another big difference is what you can put in the side bars (the narrow column(s) to the left or right of the main column). Both Blogger and Wordpress have some “standard” modules that you can put in the side bars. Blogger calls them gadgets. Some call them widgets. The choice is limited on Wordpress but on Blogger you can basically put whatever you want in the side bars, in addition to the wide variety of standard ‘gadgets’. On this aspect Blogger is definitely a winner.

One more limitation in Wordpress.com is that they don't allow you to embed "commercial" links, for example product links to Amazon. So if you're an Amazon associate you can't publish product widget or links to the Amazon site. To do that on Wordpress you have to pay extra.

If I would make some kind of conclusion it would be to recommend Blogger, since Blogger is easier to use for the novice but it also lets the code-savvy person do much more sophisticated things with it (e.g. it gives you total access to the template code and css).

On the other hand, if you are looking for something that lets you build more of a “site” than a blog then I’d suggest Wordpress.com is for you.

But what is really the best option is to try both and see what you like best. Both are free, both give you the possibility to do unlimited testing and see if it turns out the way you want it.

Go ahead!

What do you think? What advantages and drawbacks do you see in the Blogger and Wordpress?

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"You might also like..."

The continuing story of the new blog design!

Some blogs I've seen has this nice paragraph at the end of each post "You might also like..." suggesting a few other posts that the reader might find interesting. I've found it to be a nice feature and one that might 'lure' the reader to explore even more of the blog.

Blogger has it's own Related Posts gadget but that works by suggesting related posts based on the labels. That does not work for me since i don't (currently) use labels.

Instead I found an even better designed widget called LinkWithin.

It suggested 3, 4 or 5 related posts from your blog and they are all illustrated with an image from that post. So perfect for a photo blog!

It doesn't have any advertising (good) but you can't make any custom configuration of it (bad), except choosing how many suggestions it should make. It's rather opaque how it chooses the posts to display ("several factors, including title, tags, and contents") but the selection seems OK. The technical posts seem to get references to other tech posts.

It installed without a glitch and looks really good (I think) on the blog.

I wonder what their business model is. They say that they "plan to introduce revenue-sharing features in the future, but they will be optional". Sounds OK.

For the moment I'm anyway very happy with it, so I'd definitely recommend trying the LinkWithin Related Posts Widget.

What do you think? Does it serve up relevant related post in your opinion?

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Getting the bullet back

In the recent post on the new blog design I lamented that the unordered list bullet had disappeared in the side bar in the new blog design.

I now have it back, albeit not quite the way I want it. Here's what I did.

Inspecting the template I find this piece of CSS code:

.sidebar li {
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
line-height: 1.8em;
list-style-type: none;
border-bottom: 0px solid $sidebarListLineColor;
}

Meaning that a list item in the sidebar will get no bullet. I simply remove list-style-type: none; and the bullets reappear.

However, what I'd REALLY like is to replace the standard bullet with just a simple dash (-). All those big fat bullets are a bit of an eyesore and a simple dash would look better.

Anyone knows how to do that?

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A new blog design

If you’ve been here before you will notice that the blog has a new look! How do you like it?

The first thing you see is perhaps that it is not black any more. I did not go "all the way" as David Sanger and make it white with black text. There are good arguments for doing that, since it is much more readable. And the BKWine Photography site is already with white background. But perhaps I just wanted to test how it looked with a light gray background instead.

What do you think? Should I change it to all white? Or back to black?

The second big change is that it is a three column design.

One of the big reasons why many argue for Wordpress instead of Blogger is that it looks nicer. Wordpress also has three column templates. Blogger does not have any built-in three column designs. But doing a bit of searching on the web you can find free Blogger templates. It takes a bit of searching (and imagination) to find something that suits you. I found what I liked on OurBlogTemplates.com (as you can see in the footer). It was very easy to download and install. The theme I chose is called Webnolia. And some of the templates do look really good.

I think Blogger would compete better with Wordpress it they made it easier, and more obvious to choose different themes. Many people seem to prefer Wordpress because "it looks better", but that is purely a question of the design (the template). Blogger has also many advantages compared to Wordpress, and features that WP doesn't have. Bot somehow it seems that digging Wordpress is the thing to do. This is not to say that I have anything agains Wordpress. Only against those who off hand dismiss Blogger uncritically because 'you should'. I've built two sites/blogs in Wordpress (Ett Vin Blir Till and Languedoc) so I've tried that too and have nothing against it. It has its advantages too.

But then the really hard work starts. To tweak it so that it suits you.

I did some testing first on a “dummy blog” just to see if it could do the things I wanted it to do, and it could. (I created a new blog with a dummy name that I could test the design on and then delete.)

So then I decided to go for it. Install the template. A bit scary since if it went wrong I wasn’t sure that I could get all of the old blog back. The design (template), yes, no problem. That is easy to back up. What I was worried about was the “gadgets”, more often called widgets or modules – the things in the side bar(s). I don’t think there’s a way to back up and restore those and since I had some that had quite a bit of contents it would be time consuming to redo. (UPDATE: There's actually a post on safeguarding the widgets / gadgets that I hadn't seen: http://www.ourblogtemplates.com/2008/09/how-to-install-new-template-without.html, but it worked fine without that.)

But I went ahead. And installed the new theme. First it looked really, really, REALLY strange. But that was because the ‘gadgets’ were all in the wrong place. When installing the new template you had the option to keep the old gadgets, which I did. Fortunately. But they did not all arrive in the correct place in the new template. After moving around all the gadgets to where I wanted them (and deleting some old ones, e.g. the not so useful AdSense ones, adding some new ones) it started to look pretty good.

Then came what is almost the most complicated thing of all: getting all the colours and fonts right.

Most themes, Webnolia included, use far too many different fonts, and far too many different colours, boxes, lines and other graphic elements. But after spending quite some time in the Fonts & Colors section of Blogger it started to look pretty OK. But I warn you – it is a time consuming thing and you have to be really, really careful with the details.

There were four (or more) different fonts used in the template. I changed that to only two, and two which are very similar. Makes for a more harmonious text. To get rid of all the various boxes and lines (borders) I changed most of the colours: by setting the colour of the contents, the colour of the border, and the colour of the surrounding area to the same colour the "busy" design disappears. There are lots and lots of page elements that you have to think of and I've probably missed a few.

(UPDATE: If you use the Webnolia template DON'T miss that you need to do a slight modification in Settings > Comments > Comment Form Placement choosing "Embedded below post".)

One of the things I couldn’t fix easily was that there are no bullet points in the link lists in the gadgets. I really miss those. Perhaps I can get some if I dig into the css code of the template but that’s a bit too complicated at the moment for me. Any suggestions?

I also took the occasion to install the TweetMeme widget on the blog – the little balloon that says how many times a post has been tweeted and that gives the visitor an easy way to tweet the post. Installing that took quite a bit of fiddling and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you know a bit about the technicalities of blog code (not a lot, but at least a little bit). I read the instruction for adding TweetMeme in their help section but that did not work. At least it did not come out in the way I wanted it to look and in the place I wanted to have it. Googling a few more pages though, and looking at the source of some pages who used it, I found out how to make it appear on the page the way I want it. I hope.

The same thing goes for the AddThis widget at the bottom of each post. I had it installed previously but it had to be reinstalled when I changed theme. Not a big deal, but you have to make sure all details are correct. And quite easy to install in the template.

The new template also included a gadget to include easily a sort of menu bar at the top of the page.

Changing from a two column blog template to a three column template gives you better possibilities to organise all the stuff you want to show in the sidebars. In some cases perhaps you just want an added column for ads. I wanted the added column primarily to display separately the list of the sample stock photo galleries. From what they say in the instructions, you can even use this template for four or more columns. I also wanted to move away from the white-text-on-black-background design I had and make the whole appearance a bit more elegant.

Overall, it was actually much simpler than I had feared. It took me the better part of a Saturday afternoon to get it all right (or most of it right).

So, there you are. That’s the story behind the NEW Wine Picture Blog.

Do you like it? Suggestions for improvements?

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