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?

I upgraded our blogs to WordPress 2.5 and I am rather pleased with the new admin layout. I read that this is the first big change since version 1.5 and WordPress has definitely come a long way.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the upgrades went so smooth. All my plugins (30+) worked great after the upgrade except one which I’ll address at the end of the post.

Here are some of the new features/changes I came across in no particular order:

• A brand new Admin layout
• Admin profile color options
• Media Library - shows type of file, date imported and the post it appears in and a Permalink to use it elsewhere
• Supports multi-file upload
• A Manage - Link category option
• View Links (renamed Blogroll) by category and you can order it name or sort it by popularity, address or id
• Manage Posts shows tags, number of comments and status. Also sports a drop-down to view by month
• Search posts & pages (earlier no pages)
• Write screen is cleaner and sports a Toggle full screen option - very useful in my opinion
• Better support for adding different media types in the Write screen
• Excellent built-in Tag management
• Collapsible areas show tags, categories, etc under the post write screen
• The side area has been cleaned up to show just publishing options and some related links
• Related options area gives you quick links to manage all posts, comments, tags or categories
• Write link screen has an advanced option to add an image, rss feed, notes and a rating
• The Widgets page has been redesigned as well with the available, used, unused widgets filter laid out vertically instead of at the bottom of the page.
• Comment area has seen a big revamp as well.. looks and acts more like the Better Comments Manager plugin interface
• List View & Detail View
• Click on the heading to edit a comment - has a nice area to format your comment
• Settings, plugins and users management links separated out to the side
• Automatic plugin upgrade
• One buton deactivates all your plugins
• You can now set a maximum size for images in a post (Settings->Writing screen)
• Gravatar support to toggle display avatars and their rating (Settings-> Reading screen)

Here are some screenshots:

One of the best improvements for me has to be automatic plugin upgrade! This feature just rocks when you have numerous plugins like me and it pretty much becomes a hassle to keep them updated every week. Now, it frees up my time to actually write some content here.

Popularity Contest Plugin Issue

The one plugin that I had a problem updating automatically was ‘Popularity Contest’. But, WordPress Codex’s Plugin compatibility list for WordPress 2.5 already had a note linked to this plugin. Following the note, made the Popularity Contest plugin work just fine.

WordPress 2.5 Image Upload Issue

Also, when I tried to upload the images for this post I got an error with the image upload. Then, I found this useful post from Josh Highland on how to resolve it.

All I had to do was edit the .htaccess file in my server and add the following:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

Overall, I am very pleased with the WordPress 2.5 upgrade and gave me a chance to get rid of some of the plugins I don’t need anymore, making way for new ones I want to try.

If you are on the wall about upgrading your blog to 2.5, hope this would give you a little push towards that. This really has to be the smoothest upgrade I have ever done!

Of course, I took the plunge after making sure I had a good backup of my blog and knowing the backing from the incredible community of helpful folks surrounding WordPress. Have you?

Download WordPress 2.5

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 have been a little busy this week and sorry for the slow posting this week. As my regular readers know, I try to put quality before quantity and rather post 3 good posts a week than just regurgitating news that’s circulating everywhere. I hope that don’t put you off.

Alright, I won’t keep you waiting anymore and let’s look at the new and shiny Firefox add-ons I have found this week:

• Resizable TextArea - You can resize any textarea in a form while filing a complaint or while leaving a long-winded troll message in a blog. (please don’t use it here )
• Zemanta - A content suggestion engine in the form of a Firefox add-on. While you are compiling a blog post, it analyzes your post and suggests relevant article links, pictures, etc from the Internet so you can make your post even more valuable. I love the idea of this and giving it a shot this week. It supports WordPress, Blogger & Typepad. [via Weblog Tools Collection]
• OpenInWindow - If you are in the habit of separating your work by doing different kind of work in different Firefox Windows, you are probably copy and pasting links between each other. With this Firefox extension, you get a right-click context menu and you can choose to open your link in any of your open windows. [via Firefox Facts]
• Craigslist Image Preview - For the last few weeks I have been using this cool Craigslist alternative interface for surfing the list. If you still use the original one, this Firefox extension adds thumbnail images with the listing without actually clicking through to the listing. [via Download Squad]
• FavLoc - I use a folder named ‘Downloads’ to download everything and then organize things by moving portable apps to different folder and set up files to a folder to a ‘exe files’ folder, etc. With this cool extension, I can create different favorite locations and save directly to those! Wow, what a time saver. [via Firefox Facts again, thanks Mitch]
• Customize Google - If you are one of those types who loves all kinds of optiosn to tweak, tweak, tweak until you get it just right to your satisfaction, you’ll love this extension. You get tons of options to adjust Google Search results with this extension. It is not new but has seen a lot of improvements and maybe it’s time to revisit. I know I am. [via gHacks]

New Firefox Add-ons Site Open

I had mentioned earlier that the new Firefox Add-ons site will be out with Firefox 3 release. But, it’s already live for our use and if you had clicked on any of the add-ons link above, you’d have noticed that already. If not, here is the new add-ons site.

How do you like the changed interface?

If you are a web application lover, you probably have accounts everywhere in different web services such as Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, etc. And it could be incredibly hard to remember which service has something you saved or marked as a favorite or bookmarked or dugg or shared via RSS feed. The information you need is with you but spread around in various services with no real structure.

Sometimes, it might be easier to search in Google than finding it from your own favorites beating the whole purpose of saving it in the first place. In other times, you may not get so lucky to remember the right search phrase to land on the exact you link you need.

SecondBrain aims at combining all your social networking web accounts and bring all the data together in one place. It works by pulling data from your various accounts into your SecondBrain account. It will become your repository of data from various web services pulled together so you can organize them, share them and search them to find what you need.

How does it work?

A lot of the social networking sites and web applications provide public API’s or atleast provide RSS feeds for a user’s content so that someone interested can follow the feeds or interact with the data from elsewhere.
SecondBrain works with public API’s where possible and uses RSS feeds to pull in updated content for an user in other cases. Once added, SecondBrain will keep your account synchronized automatically. Some of the popular services it can aggregate content from at the time of writing this post are:

• Blogger
• Delicious
• Digg
• Flickr
• Google Docs
• Google Reader
• Picasa
• Twitter
• WordPress
• YouTube
• ZohoDocs

After importing your content, you can mark them private or public. Plus, SecondBrain can import tags from various services like Flickr, YouTube etc and you can organize your entire content by tags and collections.

Some thoughts

I like some of the integration such as with Twitter where it imports your content as well as let you post to Twitter from SecondBrain. You could also bookmark urls you come across directly in SecondBrain or via a browser bookmarklet. (added to my favorite browser bookmarklets)

I would like to see some more of my favorite sites integrated into SecondBrain like StumbleUpon, Facebook, PhotoBucket, etc. I am sure they are on to it as I am probably not the first one to request this either.

I like the idea of having an Internet content repository from all my favorite services so I can go back find what I am looking for easily. Plus, I can share all my content with everyone from one place instead of having to find and share with my friends in every service. You can find your friends from your Gmail contacts or invite them easily. One think they have improve on is to tell us in advance that we can only invite 10 people at a time. I can understand why they do this but I just quit with the inviting out of frustration as I spent a good 15 minutes going through long list of contacts and selecting the folks I wanted to invite only to find that I can’t invite more than 10 people at the same time! Atleast I am able to warn you about that.

If you sign up for a SecondBrain account, you can follow my updates at Karthik’s SecondBrain page.

I use Craigslist a lot. I have found free boxes for moving, a couch, a car vacuum and many more things from my local sellers through Craigslist. In fact, my wife even finds some freelance web development/WordPress work through Craigslist.

Craigslist operates with the less is more motto. No web 2.0 graphics. No ajax. No poncy logo. They have managed to stay in the 90s with their looks but you cannot beat the power this simple site offers. It probably owes its popularity by making it easy to use for even the not-so web savvy folks as well. That’s a good thing.

Crgslst comes to offer an alternative interface to Craigslist users. I for one welcome Crgslst with open hands for the excellent features it offers to the goldmine of Craiglist data.

Crgslst Quick Look

• A simple Ajax interface with the search form to the left
• A way to save your favorite locations and keep them visible for easy access - very useful for me as I tend to search different locations for different things. For eg: when I am looking for a furniture I will be looking for something close for easy transportation and when my wife is looking for some freelance gig, distance wouldn’t matter
• It also shows your past searches - great for quickly searching the same item day after day. There’s a clear button if the list gets too long or if you don’t want it
• The search results are neatly displayed sorted by the date of posting and the actual title of a Craigslist post.
• Another great feature I like is that you can ‘remember’ the results you like for easy access later. Right now it shows a serial number for the post in the items that remembers and it’ll be helpful to see atleast the first few words of a title instead. I also like that it highlights a whole listing in yellow if you have already saved it to ‘remember’.

Crgslst is in beta and are saying that they are adding more features soon. I am really looking forward to seeing those but I will be content with just the functionality they have given already. It just has made my Craigslist surfing 100x faster.

There have been a couple of attempts such as this in the past but were shutdown because they were burdening Craigslist’s servers. I am not sure how the earlier attempts worked but Crgslst say they are working off of existing Craigslist feeds to show us the information and they don’t serve multiple city search at the same time so they don’t bring down Craigslist’s servers.

When you click on a Crgslst result, you still see the original post in Craigslist so I don’t see the harm of this new service to Craigslist.

What do you think of Craigslist alternative, Crgslst? Can you think of a reason why Craigslist might get pissed off by this new service?

[via Download Squad]