8th Layer Archive

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November 02, 2001

Website Analysis

Ahhhhh.... *leaning back and cracking knuckles*

Well, I've finally completed most of the move. All three blogs have been moved over to Movable Type. I love it. I'm not sure if I love it more because the interface is blue or because it's so easy to set up and use. Either way, Tracy and I love it to pieces.

Our blogs are not the only thing that moved recently. We got our own domains too. We set up our pages in a whirl of glee... The new digs called for a redesign and we copied, pasted, rearranged, and uploaded. (This is what necessitated the first blog move.) Now that we've "arrived"... Tracy's happy and just keeps on truckin'... La, la, la, la-la... Puter nerd that I am - I realize the ramifications of moving and not leaving a forwarding address. All the entries in guestbooks, webrings, links on other people's pages, links in other people's blogs... All doors leading to nowhere...

I'm a responsible netizen. I can't have my sites looking like an Escher painting. I have to fix it. I have to tie up the loose ends. I have to take my meds. Oh no, that's Tracy that has to take her meds. (Note: I promised Tracy that my post would be about her today, so I'm trying to mention her as much as possible - the chocolate isn't working...)

So anyway... I'm almost done with the cleanup. I finally put redirect pages up for all our old bellsouth.net pages. I've cleaned up all her links on her blog and homepage. I've cleaned up all the links on my blogs. I've put redirect pages up for all of our blogs (3 altogether). And as soon as I post this, I'll be working on cleaning up the links on my homepage. That still leaves all the webrings and straggler geocities pages to clean up.

We've got so many little pockets of pages it's scary. It's not because we're goofy...well, maybe we are, but it's unrelated. It's mostly a size issue. We're sharing a home, hence, we're sharing an Internet connection (we used to even share one computer). I'm sure we're not the only ones doing this. The three of us all want our own homepages. We want to put up pictures. We had 5MB of space to do this all with...(and no cgi ability). As much as I love my FastAccess from Bellsouth, their homepage stuff sux hairy buffalo balls. 5MB was good in '95 when I had my first homepage. Now it's meager. Even geocities and angelfire give you more room than that! And even geocities and angelfire have stock guestbooks based on your username - it's not all that hard and it's not THAT big a security issue (if you do it correctly). Bellsouth's big excuse for not allowing cgi is that it's a "security risk." I'm sure it is on *their* servers, but it's not that big a deal if configured properly. Speaking of configured properly... one of the other gripes about the old site is the URL. You're supposed to use the "~username" in your address. It's supposed to go to your home site - regardless of where on the server they put the dang thing. Well... the "~username" goes to this extremely long URL... http://personal.lig.bellsouth.net/lig/l/o/lori702/ That was for the front page. Since we shared it, we were shooting for subfolders - which sometimes didn't work. It was so screwed up that using the "~username" was equal to putting "bellsouth page not found" in the address. The entire url works. Who the hell wants to put such a loooooooong url in when you're signing a guestbook? If I'm targeting a specific area of my (new) site, it's worth it. On a regular basis to sign a guestbook or a blog comment...sheesh - they get the domain.

So now I've got about 10 geocities sites to ferret out usernames and passwords and clean up. And a bunch of webrings to ferret out passwords and update. We still haven't moved Spencer's site (or updated it in a long time). I'm really looking forward to displaying some of his artwork. He's so good at it! And I think the activity of creating the pages qualifies as "computer lab time" for his homeschooling activities. He used to have a diary too. I'm hoping to get him to start using one - it would help him with his typing, spelling, and writing.

One of the other things on my "to do" list concerns web analysis. Since I now have access to the raw logs for the site, I'd like to start into analyzing the hits (especially Tracy's - she loves that stuff). I did a lot of work with WebTrends at my last job, so I'm a bit familiar with a few tricks of the trade. I've downloaded Analog (and Report Magic). I'd appreciate pointers to any sites that deal with web traffic analysis, website promotion techniques, etc... I'm sure there's something on Elegant Hack's archives, but I'm open to suggestions, links, and titles which discuss these techniques. TIA.

Posted by BlueWolf on November 2, 2001 03:10 PM