Google Analytics is a system for tracking traffic to a website. By including a piece of code that appears within every page on a site, information sent voluntarily by visitors browsers can be accumulated over time and used to provide interesting statistics about the nature of the traffic to any particular site, most importantly where they came from.
After considering changing my web hosting, for various sites one thing has occurred to me which may be worth an airing and that is that the act of migration can be non-trivial with larger sites these days. If you have a domain with a couple of established blogs and maybe a mediawiki installation then it’s not just a question of ftp-ing a few dozen files or so. The software itself takes up a lot of space for each installation, together with all the plugins and customisations, then there’s the content section which may have a large number of images each with thumbnails and size options, and finally the mySQL databases which are not always so easy to transfer. As far as I know there is no way to ftp across from one website to another so the whole process needs to be done twice, once to download an entire site to a local computer, and once again to upload everything to the new host. File permissions are often not re-created exactly the same as the original leading to access errors which all need sorting out.
One utility which helps with the process is a program called mysqldumper. It makes sure your database is fully exported and re-imported, getting over any file size limitations.
Image editing can be really simple, like just cropping or resizing a photograph or it can get extremely complicated when used by professional graphic designers tp produce high quality retouched illustrations for printed magazines.
In between those extremes there is also a space for the amateur photographer, website builder or blogger who wants to do a bit more with images but doesn’t have the time or money to get to grips with a 10 tion gorilla piece of software thet is Photoshop.
There have always been simple image editing programs for Windows computers, I remember Paint Shop Pro which was pretty good. On a Mac there is a program called iPhoto which comes bundled with the iLife package, pre installed on Mac computers – which is remarkably good for cropping, and making some automated adjustments with edit tools like sharpen, highlight and shadow.
To go beyond iPhoto but short of Photoshop I recommend Seashore the free image editor for Mac. It’s based on Gimp technology, so it’s quite powerful, but uses the Mac Cocoa system which makes it integrate really well with the Mac way of working, and fast.
This is an Evernote Widget that should display a clipping I made earlier and published as a notebook all about organic boxes. Let’s see how it works….
The best idea is to use a wiki for compiling a list of twitter accounts. Having an endless thread going on in a forum is not really so helpful.
Drop.io is a quick and simple way to share files, links and pictures without even logging in. Here’s one which was made for a pack of bloggers to share twitter accounts.
Recent Comments