Social Bookmarking Tools

I have been looking around for tools to help me with social bookmarking. You know the kind of thing, instead of manually adding my link to Delicious, etc one service at a time, these tools will add your link to them all, at once, no muss no fuss.

That’s the idea.

It doesn’t take mad Google skills before you find OnlyWire. Looks like just the ticket.

OnlyWire: The Only BookMarklet You'll Ever Need!

The only bookmarklet you’ll ever need, it says. Sure looks comprehensive too. Doesn’t quite do them all, but it’s a start.

But, and isn’t there always a but? But, those mad Google skills come in handy a bit more.

It seems there is a sneaky little clause in the small print that everyone agrees to when you blithely sign up. Yup, you guessed it, accusations of spam, no less.

Could be people are leaning toward tin-foil-hat brigade, or maybe they have a point. It seems when you add your registration you give the company carte blanche to link up, using your account, anyone they choose to. Without your confirmation or even being aware. Hmmm … is that right? Could that be true?

Enough people are accusing them of it that I am worried, but so far nothing has appeared in my lists that I didn’t put there.

Anyone have any experience of this service, or can recommend a better one?

Woopra Review

You might recall earlier in the year a flurry of reviews of an analytics service called Woopra. They made a splash at WordCamp Dallas, which led to appearances on TechCrunch and the fantastic Geek Brief (got to love that show).

Woopra is a real-time stats service for websites and blogs. Unlike traditional analytics solutions, you can actually see people arriving at your site, and even chat with them in an IM/IRC-like chat window.

Sounds neat, huh?

I originally heard about it from Lorelle at SOBCon (Lorelle interviews the founders of Woopra here). She was handing out invites, but I didn’t get one, but wasn’t upset as I am a Mac user and was “reliably” informed by a fellow attendee that it wouldn’t work for me anyway. Or maybe it only works on 64-bit Macs, or something. Or maybe it did work and I was just misinformed.

Anyway, a couple weeks back Jamie Horrop introduced the northern UK bloggers meet-up to the service and gave me an invite. This time I was informed it would work, so of course I was eager to try it out.

Woopra provide a WordPress plugin so I signed up, used my invite and installed the plugin … then forgot all about it. Little did I realize, it was not for some reason recording visits.

Today I did an email giveaway to my subscribers, a special report in PDF for free download. Seemed like a good day to have some real-time analytics. Ooops, no data!

Luckily as well as the plugin there is your bog standard javascript copy and paste, which worked a treat.

Woopra

As you can see, the interface is lovely. This java based desktop application looks fantastic, and is a credit to them, and an example for anyone else who thinks they can design a UI.

Is there more to it than gloss and glamor?

Yes, and no.

Other than the real time stats, which to be fair you can get at PMetrics, there is little here that you can not get at Google. Let’s face it, real time is not going to be something you need every day.

The chat part? Not convinced. I couldn’t get anyone to chat with me. Perhaps it is a popup blocker problem or a browser issue? Or perhaps nobody wanted to chat.

That all said, it could replace your current favorite stats package, it is pretty much all there.

Woopra

It’s really cool to see your stats grow and change as you watch. Quite hypnotic.

Woopra

For business users though there is one GLARING omission; no support for online BUSINESS. Conversions. Advertising tracking. Custom filters …

Consider your standard, default, business with an online presence. Someone who is using the web for sales, not just for attention. Where are the features that help those guys?

Luckily there is an API, perhaps someone will be adding something for us folks who care about making money and stuff. It must be said too, this is still under development.

So in summary, it looks great, and it blows the little guys like statcounter off the web, but you will want to keep Google for a little while yet.

Save Web Pages for Later with Iterasi

A perfect combination of events today. The first is an unhappy event. I feel ripped off by an online merchant. The second is an online service that will help me in my dispute.

I bought a product with a membership continuation program as a “backend”. You know the kind of thing, you buy the download but to get the download you have to be plugged into a “free trial” of a membership site, but cancel soon enough and in theory you shouldn’t get billed.

Well I tried to cancel. Twice. Using the email information provided in the support knowledge base. Today I got billed.

Of course I tried (again) to contact the publisher, but I was worried he will change the information on the site. I was going to take a screenshot but then I saw on TechCrunch that Iterasi was now available for Macs.

This service allows you to grab pages exactly as they are, store and tag them for later retrieval. Just what I need!

First you sign up and download the toolbar. Then when you come to a page you want to store, you hit the appropriate button.

iterasi Help

Unfortunately the “Quick” option stores pages available to the public. Not good if you want to keep receipts, booking details and login information.

Firefox

To keep something private you have to use the more detailed form. I’m guessing most people will quickly find the longer route more useful when it comes to retrieval time anyway, you will be glad of the folders and tags.

Firefox

Once you have filed your stuff away, you can browse and get your info back out quite easily. No, I am not showing you my account!

Think this might be useful to you? Please share in the comments …

Protect WordPress Logins

Your Minder - WordPress Single Logins

As WordPress gets more and more used for non-blog type roles there becomes a greater need to protect your security and content privacy.

Unfortunately WordPress out of the box makes it easy for multiple people to share one login.

This isn’t so bad when you share a login between authors, although a better idea would be to give each author their own login and only the permissions they require.

The problem comes when the login is provided to gain access to paid and premium content or when the WordPress install is for private and confidential information, for example a company extranet.

Luckily a plugin has been created to help with these issues, restricting one account to a single login session and booting off anyone found to be sharing accounts.

The product is called Your Minder and is from the same people as the membership plugin previously reviewed.

Your Minder - WordPress Single Logins - WordPress Specialists

Features

  • Flexible Logic system allowing you to specify the number of IP address able to access the same user account within a given period
  • Chose between Soft or Hard Lockouts
  • Soft Lockouts – log both parties out and redirect the user to a page of the admin choice
  • Hard Lockouts – Logs both parties out and prevents re access until certain conditions are met
  • Timed Lockouts – If using the hard lockout options a time delay can be placed before the user is allowed to login again.
  • Email Re-activation – Using Hard Lock out the lock can remain in place until the user reactivates the account via a link sent to the email of the account holder.
  • WordPress MU 2.6 support!

I think well worth the $15 charge. Check out the plugin page for more details.

Reputation Management Software Tools Roundup

In my last post I put out a call for Reputation Management sites and software tools. Here are the recommendations that came back.

Andreas Gohr suggested a fun site called EgoSurf. It’s probably not going to tell you much that a simple Google search wouldn’t, but it is a nice way of presenting the results
egoSurf - ego surfing without the guilt


Joel Falconer uses Summize to search Twitter then serve up the results in a feed
chrisgarret - Summize

Tom recommended his own tool, Distilled which has free trial available.

Melissa let us know about a tool that allows you to search multiple sites called keotag.com. Results can be saved as a feed too.

Wagner Fontoura uses a blog search engine called blogblogs.com.br

Mark linked to a honking big list of sites over at linkbun.ch that will take you all day to get through!

Stefan Deak found this list over at mashable

Finally a great suggestion by Dean Hunt

create an “about-me” or “media” page, and link to all the mentions of yourself that you like.

If you see stuff in the searches that are not what you want people to find, then you need to create or promote the good stuff. Dean reminds us that linking out to the best stuff as much as possible is a good start!

Software Tools for Managing Your Online Reputation

Reputation Monitor Tool - Maintain and build your reputation by monitoring what people are saying about you online.

I just got tipped off about a new reputation management helper developed by Strategic Profits.

What it does is creates an OPML file containing search feeds for popular online services based on your search terms.

This is pretty cool because setting up the feeds individually is a bit of a chore, especially if you have plenty of phrases to monitor. And monitor them you should if you care about your online reputation.

Feeds featured are your pretty standard fare:

… along with some I didn’t recognize. Sneakily they also add in Rich Schefren’s own blog – naughty! Nice way to pad his subscriber count, heh :)

If you really want to monitor your reputation though you also need in addition at least Google Alerts, and a good Twitter search. In fact you need to be involved in the social media in an active and engaged way.

You can try the Reputation Monitor tool here.

Any more tips for how you might monitor your online reputation? Please share in the comments and I will highlight the best comments with links.

Run DOS Software on Your Phone?

Emulators are not new. Playing old games is something of an internet obsession, especially arcade games under the MAME system. When a couple of friends emailed me saying their workplace had ground to a halt since discovering a x86 emulator I was interested but not shocked.

I was more intrigued when I found out it was Java based. Most often these things will not work on a Mac.

x86 Emulator Running on Macosx

x86 emulator on macosx


If you go check out the demos you can see a fully functional version of DOS running in your browser window. DIR and check out the games you can play.

JPC - mem:dosgames.img


They are the full, original PC versions, not conversions or rip-offs, the actual binaries running in your browser.

prince of persia on macosx

It’s not all fun and games. This will be useful for anyone who has an old proprietary utility or application they need to run. You can even have a play around with Linux, how cool is that?

This is cool enough to warrant talking about but it was only when I discovered that apparently it should run on your phone that I just had to look closer! Sounds like just the thing for my vacation. You can be sure as soon as I have posted this I will be finding out why it won’t currently run even though they clearly show a n95 working. Next step will be every old DOS game I can. Wouldn’t it be cool if by the time you read this I will be sat on the beach playing Duke Nukem? :)

Get the download here or go to the online demos to have a play!

Easily Copy Music from iPod to Your Mac

While making arrangements for my vacation this week I really needed to sort out my iPod library. Since moving from PC to Mac my mp3 collection was in disarray. The only trustworthy set was on my iPod, and I was very worried I was going to lose it through a disk crash or worse.

What I wanted was a software tool to pull my music back off my iPod onto my Mac, and I found it in Senuti.

Copy MP3 Files off Your iPod with Senuti

Hunting around the intertubes there were various tutorials and tips for how you can grab the files off the hard disk, but this solution was the most elegant.

copy files from ipod to mac with Senuti

The main benefit of the application is it talks directly to iTunes and can work with your library to incorporate your music.

It is intelligent enough to know when you have the file already on your hard disk, and to ignore those, even when creating a play list.

Feature List

The only hiccups I found are it seems to not like certain tracks, and an annoying dialog that pops up every now and then for now apparent reason

Senuti

I would love to know the cause of that, it’s not dialogs open on iTunes as it suggests.

If you have a Mac and want access to your music locked away on your iPod, Senuti is the tool for you.

Google Trends for Websites for Checking Competitors

Webmasters have been using tools like Alexa for a while to see how competitors compare in terms of traffic. Recently Compete came along, with much the same kind of features. Now Google is getting in on the act.

Enter “Google Trends for Websites”.

Google Trends has been around a little while, with that you can see the progress and demand for certain keywords. This looks at a website and sees how much traffic is moving and also lists some phrases people use to find it.

Enter your domain over at the trends site and it should give you a snapshot along with a graph of your traffic peaks and troughs. It should, but right now for my own site it doesn’t so I have to demonstrate using my friend Darren’s ProBlogger.net instead.

Google Trends for Websites: problogger.net

As you can see, Google agrees, it places chrisg.com as the first “also visited”. For a moment I thought it was measuring just my visits but it seems to be the same for everyone. I would have thought problogger readers were more likely to be johnchow and shoemoney readers before mine but there you go, shows what interesting results you get.

So while it allows you to snoop on your neighbors, a nice little surprise gift with the tool is it tells you who your neighbors are. Pretty neat huh?

As with all labs projects, it could break or be taken offline at any time. So take a look now while it is working :)

Tracking Your Stats With Analytics Software

When I work with my blog and website consulting clients I always ask for some sample stats. You can learn a lot about the health of a site, plus where they might gain more traffic, just by reading their traffic reports. I just received some stats from a client and they came through as screen grabs from a server side service provided by their ISP. It got me wondering what the right reports to use are.

There are two types of stats, broadly, server-side and client-side.

Server-side stats are broken down into “log file analyzers” and “CGI”. Log file analyzers take your web server log text file records that are created any time anything happens on your server, and produce stats from those. CGI type stats record to files or database, but are based on your website software, not the web server.

Client-side stats are things like Google Analytics, where you get given a piece of Javascript code to put into your template so whenever a visitor arrives on a page containing the tracking code, their activity is recorded.

I always recommend you not use server side for measuring your traffic because it includes “bot” traffic and such, so you get an inflated view. Bots are things like search engine spiders that read through your site to add the information into their index so they can find your pages when someone searches. There are also bots that are there to scrape your content to steal it, or to cache it for easier and speedier loading for corporate or ISP level access. This can add up to quite a lot. Because my domain is nearly 10 years old it attracts a LOT of this kind of activity.

For the most part the client-side will be a more realistic view of who is really actually reading your site as it only activates when the javascript or images are loaded in an actual web browser. While a percentage of people can block this code, it is not going to be off by the same amount as server side stats will be.

I can see how you might want to show inflated stats. It would be more persuasive to advertisers for them to think your traffic is double or higher than what it really is, but how many will accept this inflated count and how ethical is it to sell advertising based on visits not even performed by human beings?

Which kind of stats do you use and which do you share? Please let me know in the comments …

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