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 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.

If you have a blog or a website, I am sure you love checking different stats from time to time. I have to confess that I have caught myself obsessing over some of these numbers in the 9-10 months of blogging. I have used Xinu, Website Grader, Bad Neighborhood & BuiltWith to get a quick summary of various stats about ShanKri-la or any other blog/site I am curious about.

DnScoop offers us various stats about your site and has been put together by Badi Jones. Here are a few things you can get from DnScoop:

• Age of a domain - older domains tend to rank better. Although I started blogging in March’07, I registered my domain 1 year, 3 months & 10 days back.
• Google PageRank - Shows your PR & verifies if it’s valid.
• Inbound Links - Shows the number of inbound links. Did you know ShanKri-la has 20,000+ inbound links. I know that’s freaking awesome.
• Alexa Rank - in addition to showing your Alexa rank, it also shows which breakdown your blog belongs to
• IP neighbors - If you use share hosting, it shows which others sites share your IP address. You can see if your IP is shared by a bunch of porn/splog sites which could be a negative thing. Mine shows that I share my IP with 330 other sites! Wow.
• Link Value Report - Based on the above stats, they give you the value of a link in your blog if you monetize it with Text Link Ads. ShanKri-la’s estimate: $19/month for a link.
  That is very tempting but is it worth the Google PageRank slap. I think I might wait a little bit more before I venture into this. If you are interested in advertising in ShanKri-la, I have some changes coming up in the New Year to facilitate just that.
• Site Value Report - Again based on the above estimates, you could find out what is your site’s perceived worth. They estimate ShanKri-la’s to be $11,639! I have no intention of selling ShanKri-la, just for the record.
  If you are really proud of your blog, they provide a snippet of code to display your blog’s worth in your sidebar.

As you can see there are many ways to quickly get a feel for your blog stats. Obsessing over these numbers isn’t the best thing about blogging but it doesn’t hurt either to do it at some level as these can serve to improve your blog in many ways.

But, content and your readers have to come first. That is the sure way to success and the rest is just to help your blog get better and stay healthy.

Merry Christmas to all my readers celebrating tomorrow!

[via Blog About Your Blog]