The Computer Zone

With the start of November came an end to one of the busiest months of blogging for me. In the month of October I switched over this blog from its old domain to the one you’re at today. I released a number of quality articles (over 20 to be exact), and I received the most amount of visitors to this blog since it was created. Here are a few of the statistics for this site

Visitors: 966
Page Views: 1582
Visitors / Day: 42
Page Views / Day: 68
Avg Feed numbers: 14 subscribers

Now on these statistics are not very large especially if you compare it to John Chow’s, but to me their amazing. First of all it signifies that I successfully launched this blog. I was worried that I might only get 100-200 visitors for the entire month. My goal was 500 and I almost doubled that. In The Computer Zone’s first month I got a number of quality link backs, I introduced myself to a number of well known bloggers and I had a lot of fun.

Here are a few of my favourite posts from this month

• How Not to Reply to an Email
• Geeky Halloween Costumes
• Tips to Increase Your Feed Subscribers
• The Key to a Good Post
• Why Did You Start Blogging?

Why Did You Start Blogging? and Geeky Halloween Costumes definitely brought me the most amount of visitors this month and I’ll explain why later.

There are a few other things I want to mention. First of all I’d like to send a great thank you out to Scott from Chipseo.com for the free advertisement and logo design. I won it through one of his contests and he was awesome to deal with. I would totally recommend his blog because theres a tonne of great content there.

The final thing I want to mention is stick around! This month is going to be even more exciting with a new theme in the works as well as a week long series on “Technology in our Lives”.

On Monday I accidentally released a post without intending to do so. I’ve been writing a week-long series of “Technology In Our Lives” but due to exams and such it’s taken me a long time. The first one was post-dated for yesterday and I accidentally forgot and let it autopost. This wasn’t really a problem since I caught it 10 minutes later but unfortunately it got into my Feed and a bunch of people have been reading it. I’d like to apologize for everyone who read it and is wanting to see the second one. I promise they’ll be out soon.

BREAKING NEWS!!! Google is currently updating PageRank’s (PR) around the world. After last weeks penalty PR updates it seems that Google is finally updating the PageRanks for everyones sites (and not in a negative way). Recently I’ve seen an increase in my tutorial site Easy C Tutorials (it went from unranked to PR 3), Sanctified Studios (went from a PR 0 to a PR 5) as well as a few other sites.

So what were these penalties?
After last weeks penalties to a few high profile websites, the blogosphere was up in arms against Google. There were people saying that the PR was now a joke after Google issued these penalties. Now before I start talking about the newest update I’ll explain what the penalties were for. It seems that Google has started a war against selling advertising links on your site. A number of high profile sites had their PR dropped, some by as high as 4 points.

These penalties now make it a harder choice for some websites whether or not to sell advertising. In one hand it can bring in precious income for your website (sometimes your only income). On the other hand Google will now penalize your website by dropping your PR.

Google’s newest update
Google’s last PR update was last April (almost 6 months ago). Considering the average update time was 3-4 months this extra wait had a lot of people worried. People were wondering whether Google was still going to use their PR algorithm or if they were switching to something new to calculate a websites authority.

This this recent update (both up and down) it shows people that Google is still going to use their PR algorithm. For some who are advertising this is bad news because their PR is going down. For those who don’t use advertising (or at least not in an obvious way) this can be a good thing.

Thoughts on the matter
Personally this update in the PageRank is a great thing for me. One of my sites has seen an update, however The Computer Zone is still too new for an update. I’m hoping in the future that updates will come a little more quickly in the future

I haven’t put out an actual post in the past couple of days. Life’s extremely hectic with three exams this week, two next week and a bunch of assignments sprinkled into the mix. So whats on the horizon for The Computer Zone

• A new design! Yes it’s coming I promise.
• A series entitled “Technology in our Lives”. This series will basically go through different technologies in our lives, whats changed and whats coming up.
• A bunch of other posts.

The new design will hopefully be around by the end of October. The series “Technology in our Lives” should be out next monday (it’ll be a week long series). There should be a few posts this week and then regular posting will continue after the series.

If anyone has any questions or comments feel free to email me at adam [at] thecompzone [dot] com or by my Contact page

I was browsing digg.com like I normally do when I found a tool that calculated your Addiction level to blogging. Now it’s just a fun little survey that asks you 14 questions ranging from “Where is your blog located?” to “How do you stay up to date with all your favorite blogs?”. I think it’s funny and to show how much I’m addicted to blogging here’s my score.

74%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Post your score on your blog to show your viewers how much you’re addicted to blogging.

Yesterday Easy C Tutorials experienced a prolonged downtime from about 10:00AM EST to around 4 or 5:00PM and I’d like to apologize to everyone that visited. Media Temple (our hosting service) was extremely quick to fix the problem once they knew about it.

Downtime is a problem that has plagued every blogger at one point or another. Maybe you were changing themes and had to take the site down for a few minutes, or maybe your hosting provider encountered a problem and your site(s) didn’t load for a while (like me). Whatever causes the downtime it can hurt your blogs reputation if it happens often so the question is what can you do to minimize your downtime?

Monitor Your Sites
One of the reasons why you’ll rarely see a large blog/site down for any extended period of time is because they monitor their sites religiously. If their site goes down for any length of time they lose money, simple as that. If you don’t monitor your site how are you supposed to know that it’s running slow? Emails? A friend telling you? Monitoring your site is definitely the quickest way to make sure your site is running properly.

Monitoring your site doesn’t have to mean that you’re on it 24/7. If you have more important things, and unless you’re a professional blogger you probably do, go and do those things and check in from time to time. At a minimum you should be checking your site at least once a day. If theres a problem and it’s lasting longer than a day you’re going to lose a lot of viewers. When a viewer comes to a site and sees that it’s down they often remember and will avoid the site from then on. This is one of the biggest reasons to minimize your sites downtime.

Contact Your Hosting Provider
Once you know that your sites down (or unusually slow), the next thing to do is to contact whoever is hosting your site. Often times it’ll be a problem with the server that they’re using to host your site. When I contacted MediaTemple to tell them about the lagginess of my site they responded very quickly telling me that they were resolving the issue as quick as they could. This kept me calm and I knew that my blog would soon be up. If you don’t contact them however they may not know that there is even a problem. If you’re a paying customer then they’ll most likely be quick to fix it because they want to keep your business.

“I’ve contacted them and they don’t seem to be doing anything to fix the problem” I’ve heard of a few people who ran into this problem, with their hosting provider not really caring about the problem. At this point you have to decide whether the service they provide is worth the downtimes then theres nothing you can do. If it’s not worth it you can threaten to leave if they don’t fix the problem. If they don’t fix the downtime quickly, leave, find a new hosting provider.

Try Other Fixes
If your site is just taking a long time to load (isn’t completely down), try putting a small static index page telling the viewers that your site is currently experiencing technical difficulties and will soon be back up. Hopefully this page will load quicker since it is small and wouldn’t have any PHP (or whatever SSLs you use). This fix really only works if your site is experiencing slow load times. It won’t help if you’re site is totally down.

These are a few things you can do to minimize the amount of downtime your site will see. In the end though everyone experiences downtimes and you just have to deal with it. Hopefully your site will experience downtime as few times as possible.

Easy C Tutorials is celebrating its second month of life. While this definitely isn’t that big of a deal since some blogs have been around for years but I’m still proud of my creation. I’m surprised that I’ve actually kept around long enough and continued to post even though school is going on.

This month’s statistic and blogging tips are about statistical counters and which ones I use. Here’s a list of things I use on my site to keep track of my visitors:

• Feedburner:
  Most of you know what Feedburner is and what it’s used for. For those who don’t, Feedburner is a feed “enhancer”. It takes your default feeds, and ads more functionality to it without you having to modify it yourself. Feedburner also allows you to keep track of everyone who has subscribed to your feed. This gives you a general impression on whether or not people like reading your stuff. I use Feedburner to keep track of my feed subscribers as well as make my feeds nice
• Sitemeter:
  Sitemeter is simply a tool that keeps track of your visitors. All you have to do is signup, add a few lines of javascript to your blog (they supply the code) and then watch your statistics flow in. The great thing about Sitemeter is that it’s real time statistics. You can see the statistics as the people visit your site. There are a few problems with Sitemeter though. The first problem is that it only holds data for the last 100 people unless you sign up for their premium service (which is $6.95/month or more). The second problem I have with Sitemeter is that unless you sign up for their premium service you have to place a little graphic on your page. While this graphic isn’t too obtrusive it doesn’t look great. Oh well I guess thats the price you pay for real time statistics
• Google Analytics:
  Google Analytics is basically the same as Sitemeter except it doesn’t give real time statistics and fixes all of Sitemeter’s problems. Google Analytics gives you detailed information on every visitor that comes to your page. It gives you search details, referral details and more. The only problem I’ve ever had with Google Analytics is that it only updates once per day (hence why I use Sitemeter). Other than that it’s really good. You can look at almost every aspect of your blog as well as an overlay of your blog and the number of clicks there (this is extremely helpful for advertising). I prefer Google Analytics over Sitemeter any day of the week.

I use these three statistical counters to view the performance of my blog and I know a lot of other bloggers use them as well. If you have any that you use feel free to comment about them.

Now on to Septembers Statistics

My goals for September were as follows:

1. Get over 3300 visitors and 5000 page views.
2. Increase the average visitors time on the site to 2 minutes or more.

So how did I do?
Visitors: 2862
Page Views: 4602
PV per Visit: 1.61
PV per Day: 153
Visitor per Day: 95
Time on the Site: 1:54

So I didn’t actually make any of the goals that I had set out to make but I’m still extremely pleased with my stats, wanna know why? With the start of September came another year of University for me. With the start of University came a decrease in the number of posts. I haven’t posted a new tutorial since September 6th. While I’ve still kept posting in my blog the number of posts have decreased.

I’m pleased with my stats because they show that I can still get visitors even without posting every day (or week in the case of tutorials). I’m not going to make any goals for the month of October because I’m going to try to post a lot more so I really have no idea whats going to happen.

What can you expect from October
Well you can expect a lot of things. First theres going to be a few tutorials this month, one of them will be on pointers and I haven’t thought of the other one yet. As for this blog you can expect a week long series on “Technology in our lives” coming soon. You can also expect a few posts on Halloween gadgets and safety. I’m doing this do try to capture seasonal search traffic. Well those are a few things to expect in the month to come. I hope you stay around and continue reading.