August 22, 2007 at 11:55 pm · Filed under Events, Games
Red Bull’s Flugtag takes flight in Austin, Texas this Saturday. Leading up to the event, Terralever updated the Flugtag Game to include the Austin skyline. At this weekend’s event “The Interactive Landing Zone,” a hub for all things interactive, will feature:
Kiosks running the Flugtag Game
PlayMotion’s cool first-person flight simulator
An interactive craft builder
A forces of flight exhibit
and, the cool photo murals
If you’re local in Austin, be sure to stop by! Did I mention the event is at night? That’s a first (in North America at least)! There’s more information at the Red Bull Flugtag USA web site.
Update: Many of the pictures I shot at Flugtag Texas 2007 are now posted online.
I used to have Google Ads on my blog (via Google AdSense) but I removed them a few nights ago. Sure, I did get a few clicks here and there, but, all things considered, I decided, that it isn’t worth it to me.I put Google Ads on my blog as an afterthought. I created this blog as a soapbox or sounding board, like most people, and then eventually thought “I should be compensated for my efforts.” And, that’s where the Google AdSense ads came in. Signing up and putting the code into my blog was quick and easy.That is when I started making a killing on Google AdSense ads. OK. That’s not true.Unless you have a site about hot teenage asthma laywers and/or have an incredible amount of traffic flowing through your site and/or are willing to place ads in somewhat mischievous places, you’re likely not going to make a lot of money off Google AdWords advertising.Creating an enjoyable user experience got the better of me. I made an effort to be sure my ads ‘felt right’ in their color scheme and placement on my blog so they wouldn’t be intrusive to the user. I wanted to be sure that my visitors could engage my content and not be bothered by the ads. A sympathetic approach like that calls for a simple solution: just get rid of the ads.I’m not pushing a ton of traffic through this site. My content isn’t about ashthma lawsuits or Girls Gone Wild. And, I’m not willing to plaster ads in suspect places where someone might click by accident to line my pockets with pennies and nickels. So, I ripped the ads off of this site. For now. If there is an interesting, less obtrusive way that I can get some bounty for having this blog to offset operational costs like the cost of hosting, great. I’m in. Until then, a few cents here and there isn’t even close to worth bothering those who stop by.
You either love or hate the Geico Cavemen. I’m a fan. I find the Cavemen doubly great because I can’t stand that pompous little lizard. If you feel the same, check out the after party—you can throw darts at it.
I blogged awhile back about Google being less than excited about my blog. Since then, I’ve gotten some great advice, done some observation, and will continue to utilize my blog as an open mic as I hope to regain some respect in Google’s eyes. First things first-what’s with my incredibly disappearing PageRank?Maybe I’m overreacting to my loss of PageRank. To refresh everyone’s memories, I’ve lost my page rank for every page on my blog except my homepage, which, has the horrific rank of 2. It’s better than being blacklisted, but I’m certainly not on Google’s list of cool places to hang out. But, let me reiterate-although I’m in PageRank purgatory, I still receive the strong bulk of my traffic from Google. It’s not a lot of traffic, but the search traffic that I am receiving is highly relevant.For those of you that are new around the search engine landscape, here’s a bit on Page Rank straight from Google:
PageRank ExplainedPageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
Sounds like PageRank is the juice—I’ve gotta have it to drive relevant traffic to my blog, right? From everything I’ve read (including claims that PageRank is actually almost completely irrelevant) I’d say, yes, PageRank is still absolutely important, maybe it is just harder to determine what my PageRank is at this exact moment.Let’s back up. How does one arrive at knowing what PageRank is assigned to any given page on a web site? Like many online marketers out there, I use the Goolge Toolbar (or a Firefox or IE extension) which pings Google HQ and reports back the PageRank of the page that is currently being viewed in the browser. This is where I’m getting the abysmal PageRanks for this blog. It’s straight from Google. I’m screwed, right? Maybe not. The quote below is allegedly straight from a Google Rep.
“The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is forentertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers toaccess this data, Google updates the PageRank data very infrequentlybecause is it not secure. On average, the PR that is displayed in theGoogle Toolbar is several months old. If the toolbar is showing a PR ofzero, this is because the user is visiting a new URL that hasn’t beenupdated in the last update. The PR that is displayed by the GoogleToolbar is not the same PR that is used to rank the webpage results sothere is no need to be concerned if your PR is displayed as zero. If asite is showing up in the search results, it doesn’t not have a real PRof zero, the Toolbar is just out of date”
Too broadly paraphrase the Google Rep: don’t necessarily trust the PageRank indicator in your browser. Which, in my scenario, does feel right. Google has likely raised its eyebrows at me for moving the blog from a hosted Blogger to a hosted Wordpress blog—not because I went away from a Google product (although it did cross my mind), but because I made slight changes site-wide (including utilizing a completely different presentation template, changing the permalink structure, and moving pages—301′d or not… and I get a B- in that department, but that’s another story).For now, I’m going to move my PageRank concerns off the critical list. It would seem the PageRank tools are likely reporting well out-of-date data, so how much credence can I give it in the short-term anyway?The good news: Google reports that I’m indexed well. I am coming up in the search results. So, I’ll take that as a nod that things are OK for now. If things go south insofar as incoming traffic from Google, I’ll definitely reignite my concerns. There are, however, other things that come into play that can help my blog get more respect from Google. I’ll continue to blog about about this subject under the “Operation Gain Google Respect” heading and tag.
Google Analytics is a great tool, and not just because it is free. But, there are always little things I run into that Google Analytics doesn’t do that I wish it would. One example: tracking 404 requests in WordPress.Currently, when WordPress 404’s, it doesn’t redirect to a 404 page proper, but displays WordPress’ 404 page content at the request location that was originally requested. The way that this is interpreted by Google Analytics is as a successful page request. If you were to request http://smcandrew.com/some-nonexistent-page, I just get an entry in my Google Analytics for that page, which, unless I review my statistics at a granular level, I will miss. What I want to know is what page requests are 404ing in the event that there are pages that I haven’t 301 redirected correctly, or, that another site has linked to intadvertently.Luckily there is a way to report 404’s by customizing the Google Analytics JavaScript for these situations.I keep my Google Analytics code in my footer.php page, but this should work regardless of which PHP file has the Google Analytics script.How to track WordPress 404 requests in Google Analytics: Here is the stock Google Analytics JavaScript code snippit:
So, if we can just determine when a 404 request is made, we can have WordPress insert the right javascript code. Luckily, WordPress makes that easy to do. Here’s the final code, which I’ve inserted into my footer.php file, just above the tag:
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script type="text/javascript">_uacct = "UA-1449530-1";<?php if ( is_404() ) { // custom 404 code for Google Analytics ?>urchinTracker("/404?page=" + _udl.pathname + _udl.search);<?php } else { // Google Analytics for all other pages ?>urchinTracker();<?php } ?></script>
Now all requests which 404 will be logged as a request to ‘404′ and will also indicate what specifically was requested. For example, in the earlier scenario (the request for a non-existent page at ‘http://smcandrew.com/some-nonexistent-page’), my Google Analytics would report the following in my Content > Top Content report:/404?page=/some-nonexistent-pageHope this is of help to other WordPress users out there!
