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.

New link relations in HTML5

Several new rel attributes for the <a> and <link> elements have been proposed for HTML5. Existing attributes from HTML4 may be redefined somewhat. They include:

  • <rel='alternate'>
    • may be used with link, a, and area elements
    • meaning depends on the values of the other attributes such as 'stylesheet' or 'type'
  • <rel='icon'>
    • may be used with link elements
    • specified resource is an icon representing the page or site
  • <rel='nofollow'>
    • may be used with a and area elements
    • the link is not endorsed by the original author or publisher of the page
  • <rel='prefetch'>
    • may be used with link elements
    • preemptively fetches and caches the specified resource
  • <rel='archives'>
    • may be used with link, a, and area elements
    • indicates that the referenced document describes a collection of records, documents, or other materials of historical interest.
  • <rel='external'>
    • may be used with a and area elements
    • indicates that the link is leading to a document that is not part of the current site
  • <rel='license'>
    • may be used with link, a, and area elements
    • the referenced document provides the copyright license terms
  • <rel='noreferrer'>
    • may be used with link, a, and area elements
    • user agent must not include a Referrer HTTP header  in the request
  • <rel='pingback'>
    • may be used with link elements
    • usage is still being defined, but it creates a hyperlink
  • <rel='sidebar'>
    • may be used with link, a, and area elements
    • the referenced document, if retrieved, is intended to be shown in a secondary browsing context (if possible). It isn’t clear if this means a new tab, a new window, or an iFrame.
  • <rel='tag'>
    • may be used with link, a, and area elements
    • the tag that the referenced document represents applies to the current document

The best I can tell from looking at the current specs, these relative types of links are current in the HTML5 proposal. I hope I haven’t missed any.

Useful Links: Links in PDFs, CSS starter pages, Ning networks

Creating Accessible Links in PDFs from PWS gives “techniques for tagging links correctly to ensure that they are both keyboard operable and usable with a screen reader. It also looks at, amongst other things, how to make URLs more intelligible for screen reader users.”

Dreamweaver CS5 Features Part 1: The All New CSS Starter Pages at Community MX explains what Adobe has done with CS5 starter pages. Some good changes are described with more explanation to come. One thing I’ve wondered about the new Dreamweaver is whether or not there will be an option to use an HTML5 doctype. I’m watching the reports on CS5 for that tidbit of information.

In a move that may affect many educators, Ning has announced that there will be no more free social networking sites from them. Sites that currently exist must pay up or will be removed. Here are some news reports from The Inquisitr and PC World. I personally think this is a radical move that will be greeted with an angry backlash. ReadWriteWeb has a list of alternatives for current Ning sites that educators should check. At BlogHer, you’ll find even more suggestions for replacements for Ning.

HTML5 proposes figure and figcaption elements

The latest working draft of HTML5 proposes two new elements that seem particularly useful to me. These are the figure and figcaption elements. The element name’s are fairly self explanatory–the new elements are meant to let you markup figures and captions included in your documents.

On this blog, these new elements could be used in posts like Adding borders to data tables with CSS. Marking up the images used to illustrate that post as figures and adding the optional figcaption element makes perfect semantic sense.

The figure element also offers a semantic way to mark up illustrations, diagrams, photos, code listings, photos, videos, and other material. The W3C working draft describes figure as,

The figure element represents some flow content, optionally with a caption, that is self-contained and is typically referenced as a single unit from the main flow of the document.

Take a look at some example code showing a marked up image.

<figure>
<img src="table-borders.jpeg"
alt="A table with CSS borders added to the table element">
<figcaption>The default display of CSS borders on the table element</figcaption>
</figure>

The figure element is described as “flow content” within a document, however using the figure element allows for moving a referenced figure away from the primary content, e.g. to the side of the page, to dedicated pages, or to an appendix.

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: Flash vs. HTML 5, Creative Suite 5, Women in Tech on Flickr

With typical hyperbole, the news of late has been filled with headlines like “Flash is dying” and “Apple kills Adobe Flash.” Well, here’s a headline that shows that Adobe hasn’t been asleep at the wheel in quite the manner all the iPad prognosticators thought: Flash CS5 with export to HTML5 Canvas.

While we’re talking about Adobe and CS5, today is the big day to reveal all the hot new features in CS5. Start here at the Adobe blog and at the product descriptions to find more about what the latest Creative Suite promises to do. People have been talking about some of the new features in Photoshop for a while already, but I’m more interested in seeing what’s happening with Dreamweaver.

The Women in Tech pool I started on Flickr is growing. If you have some photos of women in tech you’d like to share, please add them to the group.