Bytemarks

After moving the Bytemarks blog from Blogger.com to WordPress, I felt compelled to spend a little more time with Woopra, the web analytics tool. When Lorelle VanFossen was here in October with Mactoberfest and Podcamp she was singing the praises of Woopra. I love the fact that it has a ready made plugin for WordPress. You just ftp it into the plugin folder and away you go. There’s a lot to be said about Woopra. It provides live updates to your website stats. The Dashboard is the obvious place to start with the complete snapshot of what is happening with your site. It gets interesting when you click on the Live tab in the left-hand menu bar. That view shows you the activity on your site at that very moment. You can watch as people (and bots) visit your site. You can even chat with them although I haven’t tried that feature yet, opting to respect people’s browsing privacy. I think it might be a little weird if someone was browsing the site and I popped in to say “Howzit”. Another feature I like is the Search tab. Here is where you get a history of your recent visitors, where they’ve linked from and their general location. All this happening live. Woopra is still in beta (what isn’t) and you will need an invite code. I had to beg Lorelle for mine. If you are nice to her maybe she will send you one or you can try signing up directly with Woopra.

The four day Thanksgiving weekend is coming to a close. It’s been an interesting 4 days with a lot of time to think about what is important and to give thanks to all the blessings I’ve been fortunate to recieve. I am thinking about my wife and her group who are still waiting to get out of Thailand. They went on an art tour to the country when shortly thereafter the anti-government People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) supporters occupied the Suvarnabhumi International Airport. My wife and her friends are fine and when she called yesterday they were having fun and still in vacation mode. I expect them to be back home on Thursday, four days longer than planned. I am sure they will have some stories to tell.