Complex Solutions to Simple Problems» traffic

6 free traffic analysis tools

Pål Heick — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:25:32 +0000

Found an interesting blog-post on Techchrunch today. It seems that the market for free yet complex traffic analysis tools has a few new serious competitors. This probably means that we’ll see even more features from the free analysis tools in the future.
This prompted me to do a quick writeup on the different free traffic analysis tools out there:

Woopra is the latest player on the scene and in the words of Techcrunch is ‘Google Analytics or Nuconomy, but in real time…’ – sounds good to me…
(update: Woopra is currently invitation-only)

Google Analytics is probably one of the biggest players in the market. Analytics has a really nice flashy (flex?) interface, but has a 1 day delay on traffic data.

Nuconomy

is designed to consider the impact of widgets, Ajax, Flash, mobile, etc., which don’t generally show up in page view metrics. And they are also measuring everything on both a contributor level (think analytics by author in a blog) and user level (people on the site).

(Techcrunch) … also read a positive review on ReadWriteWeb

Clicky has a nice web2.0′ish interface, and data in real time. There is a basic free account with a limit of 3 sites to track and a pro account with bells and whistles.

Statcounter has a more traditionally looking interface, but data here is also real time.

GoStats has an nice and clean interface that looks like a blend of Clicky and statcounter.

Bonus info:
If you use Greasemonkey, Joost de Valk has a really nice greaseMonkey statistics detector that gives you an idea of how and when you are being tracked.

I’m on a mix of Analytics, Statcounter and Woopra.
What do you use?

Sitelinks… Me too :-)

Pål Heick — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:35:38 +0000

Lars Bachmann showed off his brand new sitelinks some days ago. Yesterday I realized that this blog now also has sitelinks:

Go try : Pål Heick on Google

…ok so Lars has more sitelinks. But then again… he probably has more traffic, more incoming kinks, and more ‘popular pages’.

A little intra- and extrapolation then leads me to conclude that:

Sitelinks are not for the chosen few
…but sitelinks depend on a website where the actual query is very relevant.’
The number of sitelinks are affected by popular pages

And there is lots of polations to be found here: factors to generate sitelinks.

Any further polations?

Horny fox is bad for traffic

Pål Heick — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:08:01 +0000

An alert sent out by the Danish Forest and Nature Agency warns danish drivers that the next couple of months will have more fox crossing roads than usual. Many of the foxes that loose their lives are young and inexperienced and haven’t learned all the dangers and threats that we humans are. Sadly the alert is only in danish: Advarsel til bilisterne: Øget risiko for påkørsel af ræve

So to answer your question – why am I writing about foxes running wild? Well, mostly because I immediately came to think of my own little firefox reading this. I too run across some roads on the internet – and the bad things that can happen to you out there are not as obvious as a 14-wheeler truck. Phishing, spoofing, illegit cookies and on and on are daily threats on the internet. So, what ways are there to protect Firefox from all the bad traffic out there?
I’ve been looking at this extension for firefox:

Google Safe Browsing is an extension to Firefox that alerts you if a web page that you visit appears to be asking for your personal or financial information under false pretences. This type of attack, known as phishing or spoofing, is becoming more sophisticated, widespread and dangerous.

Google Safe Browsing for Firefox

…any more suggestions for enhancing privacy and safe browsing?

[Image from Wild Nature Images]

Update:
Version 3 of Firefox will (among others) have these security features:

One-click site information. Want to know more about the site you’re visiting? Click the site’s icon in the location bar to see who owns it. Identify information is prominently displayed and easier than ever to understand.
Malware protection. Firefox 3 warns you if you arrive at a web site that is known to install viruses, spyware, trojans, or other dangerous software (known as malware). You can see what the warning looks like by clicking here.
Web forgery protection enhanced. Now when you visit a page that’s suspected of being a forgery, you’re shown a special page instead of the contents of the page with a warning. Click here to see what it looks like.
Easier to understand SSL errors. The errors presented when an invalid SSL certificate is encountered have been clarified to make it easier to understand what the problem is.
Out-of-date add-on protection. Firefox 3 now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and disables older, insecure versions.
Secure add-on updates. Add-on update security has been improved by disallowing add-ons that use an insecure update mechanism.
Anti-virus integration. Firefox 3 now informs anti-virus software when executable files are downloaded.
Windows Vista parental controls support. Firefox 3 supports the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

Read more here: Firefox 3 for developers