test site

In the not too distant future, we’ll be googling to google to do google with google. And if their stock price is any indication, we’ll be doing it all from Apple computers

Anyways, I recently installed Google’s latest web service, Google Analytics, onto tantannoodles.com to give it a test run. It’s basically a web based statistics program for your web site. The verdict? Great tool to get indepth stats about your site for free, though it may not necessarily be the most easy to use tool (there are a lot of options!).

As with most statistic programs, it gives you all the basic web statistic reports. Like how many visitors and page views your site received over a period of time, where your visitors are coming from, or even slightly more in-depth reports such as what’s the percentage of new vs returning visitors. And it plots all these different reports in pretty pie chart graphs for you to look at. Any decent stats program worth it’s weight will be able to generate all these basic reports.

Now I haven’t really used any ‘enterprise’ statistics packages since they’re all kind of expensive (such as WebTrends), but what really sets Google Analytics apart from the other more mature open source packages (such as Analog or AWStats) is that it mashes up all the different kinds data it collects into what it calls “cross segment” reports, to give you some really interesting insights into your web site. For example, I can tell you that yesterday (11/27) 75% of visitors to tantannoodles.com were first time visitors, that is they never visited this site before. That’s sorta neat. What’s even neater is this next tidbit. Of these first time visitors, 36% of them came from the United States, 7% came from Canada, and 6% came from Singapore¹. Neat-o. And you can do this kind of cross referencing and drill down analysis on almost every kind of data that Google collects, along with the ability to compare reports for one time period with the reports for another. That is pretty cool.

Like I said, it’s not exactly the easiest tool to use, I had to spend a couple days trying to figure it out, but once you know how to generate all the different kinds reports, it becomes a very powerful and useful tool. Much like Google’s other services, the best part about Google Analytics is that it is completely free². That is, if your site gets less than 5 million pageviews per month. And if your site is getting more than 5 million pageviews per month, then well… uh, you win.

Check it out: Linky.

¹ Getting something you made hearted from a hawt Singaporean web designer / blogger is not a bad thing

² Unfortunately, Google has stopped accepting new web site registrations for the time being, since it’s proving to be a little too popular and is bogging down their servers. I can’t even imagine what kind of load it would take to bog down a Google server.

Yesterday I had Thanksgiving dinner at Tom and Jo’s place, who are a couple from church. They are probably the nicest people I’ve met since moving to the east coast. The world would be a much better place if we had more people like them… especially since they always seem to feed me

What do people here do after gorging themselves on food? Apparently they go shopping the next day in what is known as Black Friday. Yup, the Christmas retail madness is officially upon us. Good luck with parking.

So I gave in and went shopping for a bit today at Pentagon City, which is a mall near my apartment. Best Buy was pretty busy and they had some pretty nice deals, like a 120 gig HD for $30 (after rebates, ugh). Unfortunately, they had no more XBox 360s. I’m kicking myself for not pre-ordering at least one to resell, since they’re now going for close to $1000 each on eBay. That’s about a $600 markup, for those keeping score. Oh well.

I also went to the Apple store and picked up an Airport Express for something like 25% off. Sweet. Apple hardly ever has sales, so Black Friday is really the only time to buy new Apple gear at a discount. I think Sony is really starting to lose it’s mojo. One thing I noted was that even though the Sony Store was right next to the Apple Store in the mall, the Apple Store was something like 5 times as busy. There was even a news camera crew filming people inside the Apple Store for what I assumed would be for the evening news segment. So you might see me on TV at the cash register checking out, since the camera guy was filming me doing that :p This could be my 15 minutes 30 seconds of fame.

PS: I made a small update to my Flickr Post Bar plugin for Wordpress. Let me know if you have any problems with it (via email please!).

Here in the America, it’s Thanksgiving week and everybody is taking a four day weekend.
Whoohoo! We really need more long weekends. I hope you make good memories over turkey with friends and family this thanksgiving weekend. For me personally, one of my fondest childhood memories isn’t really from turkey, but from Nintendo… and playing hours on end trying to save the stupid princess who would always inevitably be in the wrong castle. So to celebrate Thanksgiving, even if it’s in the wrong month,
here’s an awesome video of a highschool performance of various Super Mario themes… lots of fun,
they really get into it, crowd goes wild, almost brought a tear to my eye…