Category: Software

Make movies with xtranormal

I saw a movie made using xtranormal.com and couldn’t resist trying it out myself. Registration was easy. The free options are few. If you wanted to turn out something really powerful, you’d have to pay to do it.

I did make a free movie just for fun. It was easy to do. Here’s my first movie.

There may not be one in a paid movie, but there is a second <object> included in the embed code of a free movie. It looks really ungainly to me, don’t know why they sized it like that, but I’m leaving it as is. It contains a script to collect stats. It would be a simple modification to remove that second <object>, but I decided to leave it there so you could see what you get out of the box with a free movie.

The machine generated voice couldn’t read Dreamweaver correctly, but it did fine with two words: dream weaver. The voice seemed to make sense of the content and phrasing. For example, the phrase “the catch is” was treated with intelligence. I found that impressive.

Live tracking with Woopra

Step 1: Scroll through the refreshingly charming post about the live tracking and analytics tool Woopra from Maya’s Amalgam–Discovering Woopra.

Step 2: Come back here to learn more about Woopra, because after you complete step 1, you will want to know more.

The live tracking screen of the Woopra desktop
The Woopra live tracking screen from the Woopra desktop

This is part two of a three part series on web metrics tools. Last week I wrote about Google Analytics. Next week you will learn about Post Rank. You’ll find Woopra’s site here.

There are differences between Google Analytics and Woopra. One is the live feature of Woopra. The live feature means that you watch what site visitors are doing on your site in real time. On WordPress Tavern in Woopra 1.4 Released, Pavel noted in a comment that he uses both Google Analytics and Woopra, and really likes the live feature of Woopra.

Another difference is the chat feature available with Woopra. If you want, you can initiate chats with visitors, or add “Click-to-Chat” buttons within a site to let your visitors initiate a chat with you.

On the other hand, Google Analytics and Woopra offer many of the same features. Woopra provides over 40 kinds of statistics and metrics anlyzing your web traffic. Woopra is customizable, in that you can choose the type of information you want to concentrate on and see in your Woopra desktop. You can register and track more than one blog or website with Woopra.  Once you’re signed up for an account, you make it all happen by inserting a bit JavaScript in the footer of your page, just like Google Analytics. Like Google, you can use it free.

Woopra’s free version is limited, however. The number of page views allowed in the free version is 30,000 per month. The free version includes ads. Check Woopra’s pricing plans, which range from $4.95 a month to $179.95 a month.

You can read a comparison of Google Analytics and Woopra from Royal Pingdom.

Woopra works on all sorts of platforms including WordPress, Drupal and many others. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux. There’s plenty of help with Woopra. They have an active Facebook page, a busy Twitter account, plus a guide, blogs and forums on the Woopra main site.

The chief benefits of Woopra over Google Analytics are the ability to watch visitors move through your site in real time and the chat feature. You could learn a lot from a live view of what visitors see and do on your site. If you are selling something and have the personnel to monitor the site, the ability to chat with visitors might be important to you.

A look at Google Analytics

This is the first in a series about analytics tools. In following weeks I’ll also examine Woopra and Post Rank Analytics. We’ll start off this look into the hows and whys of analytics with a look at Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free tracking tool that will help you understand how many people visit your site and what they are doing on your site. You find out what entry pages are most used, what page users were on when they left your site, where visitors came from both in a geographical sense and a referring link sense.

Elise Bauer wrote How to Build Blog Traffic – Search Engines and SEO, and it’s a definitive explanation of what Google or any other analytic tool does to help you build your blog and understand your audience. If you’ve never read Elise’s post, go take a look.

To get started with Google Analytics, set up a profile with Google for the website you’re going to track. You get a unique ID, which is inserted into a code snippet Google provides. Paste this code snippet into your web page code and you’re ready to go. SkinnyMinnyMedia has an excellent tutorial about how to insert the HTML snippet into a WordPress or Blogspot blog in Tracking Your Blog Statistics with Google Analytics. A helpful video tutorial on Using Google Analytics is available from Thirty Day Challenge.

There is a lot of documentation and help available to get you going with Google Analytics, and there’s Google customer support.

With Google Analytics, you’ll get site usage information, bounce rate (how many people left immediately), average time spent on your site, average number of pages viewed, the number of new visitors and other helpful metrics. This is more than just a count of page views. This type of information helps you understand what works on your site and what your visitors are interested in reading.

It’s the nature of a blog to read the most recent post and then leave. A blogger might not want a bounce rate report each day or week. With Google Analytics, you can customize your reports to track only the information you care most about.

Google has prepared a checklist called Get the most out of your report that will help you through each step from installing the tracking code to learning about features like keyword optimization.

With Google, you can add Google ads. The selling point for Google Analytics, from Google’s point of view, is that the knowledge you glean from the metrics you collect helps you target your advertising more effectively. As you can see in this video on Google Analytics from Google, the emphasis is definitely on monetization of a web site.

Even if you aren’t displaying Google ads, or any ads, the knowledge you gain about what captures the interest of your readers is helpful to you in planning new content and keeping your blog growing.

Google Analytics scales. It works on a mega-site but it can also work for a small site. If you have a mega-site, it would be a no-brainer decision to use it. If you have a smaller site, you might want to compare it with the two other analytic tools we’ll be looking at in future posts: Woopra and Post Rank.

Useful Links: Transcripts, HTML5, IE/Google, Harley, Mighty Meeting

Transcripts on the Web: Getting people to your podcasts and videos at uiAccess provides valuable resources for creating transcripts of audio and video.

My (current) opinions on HTML5 from Dori Smith is a reflection on the writhing mass of eels known as HTML5 and what has happened in that arena in the last few days. Dori has some ideas about what the lack of accord among the people working in this area may mean in future real world terms.

Microsoft admits Explorer used in Google China hack from the BBC explains what Internet Explorer 6 had to do with the recent attack on Google from Chinese hackers, and what Microsoft is doing to help fix it.

Harley unveils “Pink Label” line of merchandise makes me think maybe Harley wasn’t watching when Dell tried to come out with a line of “girly” computers.

Mighty Meeting Lets You Conduct PowerPoint Presentations from your SmartPhone. Remember, oh a couple of years back, when conferences were a sea of laptops and the speaker needed a big projector and a couple of people on hand to make sure all the computers worked with the projector? All gone.

Why Can’t Twitter Be More Like Facebook or Linked In?

It can. Are you looking for a way for Twitter to locate mutual friends or people who know people you know? I love this feature on Facebook and often find BlogHers or long-lost classmates based on the application’s suggestions as to people I may know because they know people I know. People who know people. Or some such.

Now there is a Firefox add-on that will help you locate mutual friends you may share with the people you follow on Twitter. (Yeah, sorry, it only works in Firefox right now.) It’s not exactly like what happens on Facebook, but it can be helpful.

Several tools for finding mutual friends on Twitter are described in the Web Worker Daily article by Doriano “Paisano” Carta at How to Find Mutual Friends on Twitter. The tool from the article that appealed to me is the Ul.timate.info add-on for Firefox.

It wasn’t just me who found it interesting. Heather squeeed about it on Twitter, so I thought I should give it a try.

Before I get too far into the description of what ul.timate.info does in Twitter, you need to know that it also adds features to Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, foursquare, and bit.ly.

Here’s what happened when I installed the add-on. It was a bit confusing at first. Normally, when you install a Firefox add-on, you set up your preferences for the new tool using the Preferences button in the add-ons window. But the Preferences button for Ul.timate.info was grayed out.

grayed out button

The instructions on the web site said to right-click (or ctrl-click on Mac) on a Twitter name or image to see a menu that would allow you to find mutual friends. I tried this about 50 times. It didn’t show me the menu! (The definition of stupidity; when it doesn’t work keep doing it the same way.)

Finally I noticed an ul.timate.info menu option way up at the top of my screen in the Firefox menu. Why didn’t the download instructions say this? Especially since it departs from the norm for add-ons? Application developers don’t spring for good technical writers to explain their new apps—one of my pet complaints.

the menu in the top menu bar

I selected Settings, then entered my Twitter name and password. Now the magic worked. A right-click (or ctrl-click) showed me all these lovely new menu options, including the longed-for View Mutual Friends.

the new menu options

I tried out a few people to see how many mutual friends we have. I have zero mutual friends with singer @dianebirch. That’s okay. I just follow her in case she ever leaves New York and goes on tour somewhere close to me. I don’t care who her followers are. But I have 34 friends in common with @jenlemen. I care about who her followers are. We share some interests. I may check her followers (I can do that with the ul.timate.info menu) to see if she found someone I’d really like to follow but don’t. Yet.

my mutual friends with jenlemen

I wish ul.timate.info would be more like LinkedIn or Facebook’s friend recommendations. I wish I could click on someone’s name and get a few suggestions as to who might be a good fit for me to follow. Even though it isn’t quite effort free to find mutual friends, I can still get some helpful tips and information from this tool. Plus, it stays out of the way when I don’t want to use it, always a good thing.

If you try it, let me know what you think of it.

Cross posted at BlogHer.

My Wordle and TweetStats

Thanks to Laura Scott from rare pattern for telling me about Wordle. Here’s what I’ve been talking about lately on this blog.
Wordle 3-23-09

Laura also mentioned TweetStats, which I tried out, too. Here’s a vision of what I’m Tweeting about (or to).

tweetscan 3-23-09

Two interesting examples of helpful online tools that are free and highly useful. WEB APPS!