Many of you may have noticed the widget in our sidebar that shows the most popular posts.  It was originally built by Alex King and has been a great plugin for our site.  Recently, we upgraded the Grape Thinking website, and one of the items we updated was this widget.  For our non-tech-savvy readers, please feel free to play around with the links, and I apologize for any tech speak.  If you are interested in using the widget for your own sit, The “cool” functionality we created was:

1. It’s a widget… this means you can easily place it in the sidebar of a wordpress blog.
2. It’s smarter !  Depending on what page you are looking at, it displays different posts that are relative to what you are reading.  To see this in action, click a tag, category, archive, or an author in the sidebar, and check out the most popular posts within that section.

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Google recently announced the release of a free safe browsing diagnostic tool. I have been frequently using this as a quick check tool on client’s websites in looking for possible penalties that could be hindering their search engine rankings.

Since it is a useful tool, I figured I would make it easy for you to test your site using Google’s safe browsing diagnostic tool by creating the simple form below. Read the rest of this entry »

So I decided to do a quick search on google to find out how the results are panning out for todays primaries in North Carolina and Indiana.

My search returned the following result.

I was behind a proxy for Canada.. but.. does this mean Canadians aren’t allow to look at the news?

Yesterday, I replaced the hard drive in one of my laptops. Everything was under warranty, so no problems there. Now that I have a brand spanking new hard-drive I figured I would take advantage of its innocence, and partition off a section for the anticipated release of Ubuntu 8.04 … aka Hardy Heron.

What a great call. Of course, I went ahead and installed the OEM Vista on a 60 gig partition, simple to do using the recovery disks provided by Toshiba. For the record, it is very important that you install the Microsoft Windows OS first if you plan on dual booting with Linux, so you can rewrite the micro$oft boot manager with the more friendly Linux boot manager. Basically, you aren’t under time constraints to choose which OS you want to boot at startup.

Today, I fidgeted with excitement as I booted up my clean Vista install, and as a first task on this windows machine, immediately browsed to Ubuntu.com to download Hardy Heron. Read the rest of this entry »

I was browsing through some old notes, and found this post by Ryan Opaz at Catavino talking about their site stats, and figuring out the reality behind pageviews in the wine industry. The post had spawned a great discussion, and in preparing a response, I decided should just write a post about site stats.

Are you tracking visitors to your website? If the answer is NO, then you have to catch up with the times. If you owned a hardware store, and I could tell you information about:

• who your customers are
• how many customers you have
• how they find you
• how long each of them are in your store
• what they are looking at
• how long someone is in a particular section
• is this their first visit
• what they bought
• at what point did they decide to leave

Would you not practically beg me for this? Read the rest of this entry »