For those of you who are a little askance with the idea of handing over your information to the Google Borg, there is a new analytics package out there you might like: Clicky. Having used it for a day or two, it doesn’t offer all that much unique from Analytics which is useful to a uISV, but it has some usability wins (no need to tag URLs on your website, automatically tracks downloads and inbound/outbound links, etc), and there are features to stalk particular folks across your site if you’re into that sort of thing. Personally I wouldn’t suggest it but if you had a webapp with a privacy policy which allowed it it might be a useful support tool.
One thing folks sometime neglect when making a webapp, and I’m certainly guilty, is making it look gorgeous. Clicky does not have that problem. I’ll be honest: I signed up precisely because it had the “new car smell” to it.
Its time for a little spring cleaning and I’m (finally) clearing out the cobwebs around here. As a result, I’ll be moving my blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress installation, changing the theme a bit, and reorganizing things substantially. Your old bookmarks and links will continue to function because WordPress is redirecting the old URL to here, but I’d suggest you update them to https://www.kalzumeus.com anyhow.
Today, on the Business of Software forums, a newer software developer asked how I managed to get people to link to me. The motivation in getting links is both to get visitors directly from the websites you are linking to and to influence the search engines into prefering your site over the other fifty zillion on the Internet when they decide “Who is worthy of this searcher?”, on the theory that someone who has convinced unrelated webmasters to link to them must be doing something right.
