I have used Google Analytics ever since I registered my first website and haven’t had any complaints so far. It does what it does ti my satisfaction and answers most questions about my site visitors plus some more. I haven’t had the need or urge to look for an alternate web analytics offering so far.

I recently came across an interesting alternative, Woopra that seemed worth looking at. One of the main features of Woopra that attracted me was live visitor tracking. Let’s look at some of the other features Woopra offers:

Woopra Features

• Woopra offers web analytics and site statistics that is updated at least once a day with several stats getting updated multiple times a day.
• It offers Live Tracking of visitors so you have more immediate information.
• Woopra can be installed on WordPress, vBulletin forums as a plugin and is also supported by manual installation on other major blog/CMS platforms. (more info)
• It comes with a cool multi-platform client software that is available for Windows, Mac & Linux.
• With the real time information on search trends, traffic spikes, user queries, generating content or taking action becomes immediate based on user actions.
• You can search your data by specific data points to get a deeper understanding of visitors that matter to your site.
• Embed a click to chat button in your site to let your visitors chat with the webmaster.
• If you run WordPress, vBulletin, MediaWiki, etc it allows tracking registered users.
• Custom notification based on your set events like certain user’s visit, or users from certain country, browser, etc or an event like an ad click or sales, etc.
• Woopra is designed to be a platform rather than a solution and can be extended with plugins and skins through their API.
• It has a thriving forum for any questions or issues you may have with the product.

Woopra is free during beta and allows tracking one site. When the paid service becomes available, Woopra says there will still be a free service.

I have registered ShanKri-la to test out this beta service and will share my impressions on it after some time and see if I can compare it to Google Analytics. I am waiting for site approval at the moment to start using Woopra and excited that the client is supported for my Linux desktop as well.

Linux Installation Tip

If you are trying to install Woopra in your Linux desktop like Ubuntu or openSUSE, make sure you have JRE 1.6 installed.

Also, if you get an error when installing with sh woopra_unix.sh command,

gzip: sfx_archive.tar.gz: not in gzip format

Try downloading the file with this from the linux command line,

w get http://static.woopra.com/woopra_unix.sh?anti-cache=12398794379

Then rename the file to woopra_unix.sh before executing it to install the client. ( ‘w get’ is just one word  without the space but WordPress won’t let me save the post spelt right)

A contact of mine on Twitter said he’s been waiting for 2 weeks for approval so I’m not sure how soon mine will be approved. As soon as it does, I will post a followup with more first hand information on this service.

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

I am a firm believer in showing love to my readers, bloggers and non-bloggers alike. I have been a ‘Do Follow‘ adopter from the very beginning of my blogging days.

DoFollow

For those unaware, WordPress makes comments a ‘nofollow’ link to make it unattractive to spammers. But, there has been a movement to reward commentators with a linkback by removing the nofollow from comments. The DoFollow WordPress plugin makes this really easy to acheive.

So, anyone leaving a comment here will get a PR5 link back to their website helping them a little in their search engine ranking. Yes, ShanKri-la just went from PR4 to PR5 with the latest pagerank update!

CommentLuv

CommentLuv is another awesome plugin in use in ShanKri-la. This is purely to highlight the commentator’s latest post automatically by parsing their blog’s feed. So, with every comment you leave, your latest post is automatically showcased in your comment giving you some exposure with my other readers.

KeywordLuv

Even though you get these benefits, the links to your site doesn’t carry much weight like a link with a targeted keyword as anchor text. That’s why we see comments with names like ‘Free iPod nano’, ‘Detroit Real Estate’. Although it looks spammy, some of these folks are well meaning and leave comments that contribute to their discussion. I can tell a spam comment most of the time and I delete them without hesitation. I do allow comments with keywords but I still don’t get to know the name of the person leaving the comment.

My friend Stephen Cronin has solved this problem with his new plugin, KeyWordLuv. Here is an excerpt:

KeywordLuv helps you reward your commentators by separating their name from their keywords in the link to their site. This gives them improved anchor text, which can help their site rank higher in the search engine results.

You can now leave a comment with your name as well as a keyword of your choice here and get a PR5 link back to your site! How cool is that? People pay big bucks for that and all you have to do is comment here.

Here is how you do it:

Leave a comment with the name field like this : (spaces are fine)

K-IntheHouse@Top Firefox Extensions

The name link in the comment will appear as:

K-IntheHouse from Top Firefox Extensions

If you are a registered user, make sure you logout to see this. Check out Stephen’s other useful WordPress plugins as well.

Words of Love

I have taken the time to make this blog friendly as well as rewarding to you should you participate in any discussion here. And I highly encourage you to do so as a blog’s real value most times lies in the discussions & comments.

But, please don’t abuse it by leaving meaningless comments like ‘Nice post’ just to get some keyword love. It doesn’t help anyone and I will delete it even though I appreciate the encouragement.

Are you ready for some loving?

Last week, I reviewed a cool file sharing web application in private beta - DropBox. I have had a chance to get a sneak peek at another cool web application, Evernote, in the last few weeks. It’s quickly replacing my need for Google Notebook and I find it worth the hassle to login to yet another web application.

Evernote

Evernote, currently in private beta, is definitely Google Notebook done better. Way better.

I have used and liked Google Notebook for a long time. It is very easy to use and is very handy to store things I come across on the web. It helps me store information in different notebooks, with titles and labels so I can easily find what I need at a later time. The Google Notebook Firefox extension made it super easy to add notes without opening up a webpage right from my browser.

Recently, I read about Evernote and signed up for their private beta and have been using it for a few weeks and I am ready to share my findings with you.

Yes, I like being the guinea pig with these new web applications so you can sit back and read my posts and see if you want to try it yourself.

Lets look at what Evernote has to offer:

• Evernote is a note taking application with a motto of making your notes available anywhere.
• Evernote is available as a web application, a Windows application, a Mac application as well as a Windows Mobile application. Can you see the common thread with DropBox?
• All your notes in Evernote are always synchronized across all your devices!
• You can create new notes with desktop/web or mobile versions of Evernote
• Create snaphots using camera phone or webcam
• Clip whole webpages, screenshots or portions of web pages - I like the ability to tag and file a clip as I am clipping.
• Desktop clients for Mac & Windows even allow drag and drop
• With the account, you get an ultra-personalized (read: obsure looking) email address that you could use to send notes to Evernote by email!
• You are supposed to be able to record audio as well and listen to it whenever you want. Haven’t tried this one yet.
• You get to save your searches and this is a great feature that’ll come handy as your notes volume increases.

In fact, on my linux machine this makes a great web application for Mozilla Prism and it works great as a standalone app! See how the green matches so well with my desktop background.

I have tried everything except the audio part and they all work great. So far, I can hardly tell that it’s a beta product. Either it’s really good or I have been lucky to avoid the bugs. I am thinking it’s just that good.

Evernote is a Freemium product which means it is free while in beta and will stay so after going stable. But, there will be a paid subscription level in the future and the exact feature split is unknown at this time. I hope it will something like Remember the Milk where you get all the features in the free account but you pay for support and out of good will.

Take the Tour

If you’d like to see some of these features in action, take the tour and see it in video.

Beta Invites

My private beta account has 10 invitations in it and as always I would like to share it with my readers. Just leave a comment and the first 10 of you to leave a comment will receive it in their email.

I do have a request to those receiving invites. Since your account will probably come with 10 invites, if each of you could a spare a couple for our readers requesting invites after you, that’ll make it 20 more invites available.

If you’d like to share the good will, mention that in the comment (with number of invites you’d like to share) and I will send you the emails you can share your invites.

In fact, if you have any DropBox invites and would like to share, there are a lot of folks looking for one as I’ve exhausted mine, please visit this post or contact me and I’ll hook you up with folks who want one.

Popular in search engines: Who called us?

I have been really looking forward to WordPress 2.5 and is here now.

I will be writing up a review of the new features this week but if you are already curious, Matt Mullenweg has written a great write up about WordPress 2.5 new features here.

One of the big changes is the new WordPress admin interface and you can watch a 4-minute screencast of it. Also, I am loving the new WordPress.org re-design. Don’t you?

Download WordPress 2.5

I am usually very skeptical when it comes to make money online programs. However, when my friend Garry Conn mentioned about it in his blog and after talking to him on IM, I have decided to give this a go.

PepperJamNetwork is a affiliate marketing network that has just launched but brings a lot of experience to the table being a affiliate marketer themselves. Having meddled with just Google Adsense so far, I am excited at this new platform of monetization here and elsewhere in my other blogs. PepperJam has a nice and trendy interface going for them and have a nice array of various advertisers already in their network that I can see fit this blog.

If you are a newbie to the affiliate marketing network arena, PepperJam has a nice FAQ section that answers a lot of questions in detail. Plus, the PepperJam accoutn comes with a chat facility and a knowledge vault that helps in this area as well.

This could be another one of those programs that comes out with nothingto show for, but I wouldn’t know that and I don’t want miss out on getting in early.

I don’t like to pepper my posts with referral links and I am transparent about things I do here. If you are interested in joining PepperJam, you could be nice to me and use the referral link below to sign up for it. Yes, they offer $5 for every sign up you refer so don’t forget to blog about it after you sign up. I hate to sound like a make money commercial, hey if it’ll pay for a nice dinner once in a while, why not give it a shot right?

Web 2.0 technology. Pepperjam Network. Sign Up Today!

Thanks to all those who stopped by to wish me on my birthday. I have spent the last year learning, growing and having a lot of fun in the blogging world. Here are some great posts that I came across since my last roundup.

• Booking a hotel, the ProBargainHunter way - ProBargainHunter
  One of my favorite bargain sites shares ideas and tips when you are booking a hotel through sites such as Priceline, Hotwire, etc.
• 8 Characteristics of a Well Designed About Page - Tish of BloggingGal
  I have long neglected my about page and Tish has given me the motivation to sit down and re-work it. Check out her convincing reasons to see why you should do it too. Also, check out her monthly contest where she gives away a cool 125×125 ad space to one winner who subscribes to her RSS feed. She is giving away an ad space to read such quality content! No kidding.. just add the feed already!
• Check Pagerank of all Internal Pages on your Site - Fahad of Technodorm
  Fahad is sharing how you can see Google PR for links in your site live in a visual way. It even shows the nofollow links with a red cross. Check out this post on other options of doing this as well.
• Don’t Let Your CommentLuv Be Stolen Away! - Stephen of More Than Scratch the Surface
  I really enjoy reading Stephen’s well thought-out, incisive, to-the-point writing style. This time he is writing about the merits of CommentLuv WordPress plugin and how you could take advantage of it. Also, take note of the section where he mentiones how Feedburner url redirection could be hurting your Google juice in this context. Excellent post, Stephen!
• Passive Income, or How To Make Money Without Trying - RT of Untwisted Vortex
  I started blogging with monetizing my blog at the farthest corner of my mind but it has become a reality in a year. So, if you haven’t yet considered it atleast read this excellent post by RT and see if you are sitting on a gold mine. I am far from making a bunch but in the last couple of months I have made enough to more than cover the costs of hosting. My next goal is to see if it can cover maybe the cost of a nice dinner and a movie every month.
• Download BitTorrent Files Without A Client - My post at TechieBuzz
  BitTorrent is a great way to share and get files for legitimate reasons even though most often it is usually identified with illegal file sharing. Find out how you can download files ia BitTorrent from a browser without a bittorrent client. Also, check out Keith’s post on a call for help. Silki an author at TechieBuzz just like me, could use some for her brother who is ill.

Also, check Kontera’s Video contest where you could win some cool cash prizes ($500, $200 & $100). Thanks Matthew of Blog About Your Blog for the heads up.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s round up. Hope you found a couple of new blogs to add to your feed reader as well.

I have been working on this theme mod for a bit and it is almost a whole month late in making its way here. I meant to release it for the New Year’s day but my day job kept me busy to complete the stuff I wanted done. So, instead here it is for your eyes today. If you are reading this in a RSS reader, please click through to check out the design effort.

Why modify instead of a new theme?

You might be thinking why I took the trouble of clobbering an excellent theme. I will have to take you back to the reason I started blogging in the first place. It was my interest in learning web development and I did not imagine I would try to make money off of it when I registered ShanKri-la (Sep 20, 2006). What better way than to get your own domain name and run a live website? After a few months of fiddling with cPanel & learning HTML & CSS, finally installed WordPress and started blogging towards the end of Feb 2007.

I am still learning various aspects of web development and have become quite adept at helping others with their WordPress theme customization. I loved the current theme I was using but wanted ShanKri-la to have it’s unique look. So, here we go with my custom modification of the Saur theme.

I have to mention a very helpful WordPress plugin that let me work on this new design while you were still looking at the old one.

Theme Test Drive WordPress plugin lets you chose a theme - in my case I made a copy of current theme to a new folder - and after activating the new theme in the plugin menu, you will see the new theme while you are logged in as Admin. Everyone else will continue to see the old theme.

Direct Advertising in ShanKri-la

I have finally opened up direct advertising in ShanKri-la. This was another reason for making the theme mod so I can implement the ad scheme the way I wanted to. A lot of themes seem to put more focus in that than usability and I wanted to strike a good balance for my readers. I would love to hear what you think about it.

Also, you won’t see Google Adsense ads anymore if you are a regular reader here or if you come directly from someone else’s site. I have made it so the ads are visible only to the search engine visitors as they are more likely to click on ads anyways and it would make it pleasant reading for my readers.

For those interested in advertising in ShanKri-la, you can get details of various advertising options from the ‘Adevrtise’ page.

Areas of Improvement

If you have a keen eye, you would probably notice all the changes but I am going to list them here quickly if anyone is interested in things of that sort.

Header area

Just some minor tweaks with the search bar gone from here to make way for a premium 468×60 ad space.

Content & Comment Area

Not any major change except the Adsense ads won’t appear for my regular readers (tell me if you miss it ) plus I have removed other ad programs that weren’t performing well.

Sidebar

This is where the big changes are done. I am a strong believer in using tags and tag clouds for easy navigation. Hence the prominent area for the tag cloud. I think the dark colored block stands out highlingting the tags, subscription options & the search field.

Also, added the 125×125 ad area for direct advertisements here.

Footer

Footer is another area I have modified a lot by moving some of the clutter from the sidebar to the footer so I can free up the sidebar space for more relevant things. Plus, the slow loading widgets such as MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, etc won’t be a concern anymore as they will be loading after everything else in the page loads up. One major advantage to this is that the sidebar now can show more and longer comments hopefully helping everyone to see the conversation going here.

I am going to concentrate next on improving the load time of the blog as well. I would love to hear any suggestions or your experience in tackling the load time problems.

After all, I have done all this to in an effort to make ShanKri-la a better reading experience for you and would love to hear how you perceive this change.