• 09/28/2008 - My Lovely Wife Lou is Pregnant
• 12/14/2007 - ArtistServer News and a new site: FreeMusicLicensing.com
• 09/18/2007 - AritstServer and ToneThis Serve Up Indie Ringtones
• 09/11/2007 - Running LightTPD and PHP on Windows
• 09/06/2007 - Compete.com -vs- Alexa.com - Comparing Website Rank
• 08/29/2007 - HostMySite.com Limits ColdFusion, Does Not Tell Customers
• 08/14/2007 - New Song: Chocolate Rain - Sonic Remix
• 08/03/2007 - If You Use Open Source, Leave the License and Credit
• 07/31/2007 - Add Links to Profiles on MySpace, Facebook, and More
• 07/23/2007 - SocialNetwork.in API Promotes Cross Site Networking

Google Analytics Opens to Everyone - No Invitation Required

Google announced today that the popular Google Analytics is now instantly available to the public. No more waiting for invitation codes. Anyone with a website can now install the website tracking tool by directly signing up at the Google Analytics homepage, or by clicking through the "Analytics" tab in any Google AdWords account. It is not required to have a Google Adwords account to run Google Analytics. http://www.google.com/analytics/

If your site receives a fair amount of traffic, and you currently attempt to process your log files, you should definately consider Google Analytics. Sign up, drop in the javascript from Google, and turn off your web logs. If you need the log data right away for some form of testing, you can always turn it back on.

After their tracking script is on all your site's pages, you'll gain access to far more than stats. You'll have charts, you'll have the ability to track goal pages, get reccomendations on search terms for your ads, you'll see where people enter and exit your site, how long they vist, and more.

Let a month or two pass, then dive into the tools they provide for analyzing your data. With a little time and effort, you'll learn a lot about your site, including what's working, and what pages need reworking.

As you can imagine, it gets more interesting once you get more than six months or so worth of data in their system. The hard part, is figuring out how to digest and reapply what you learn from the many charts and tables Google Analytics presents you.

warning Unable to open C:\CFusionMX7\runtime/lib/license.properties

There is usually a warning in the coldfusion-out.log that says "warning Unable to open C:\CFusionMX7\runtime/lib/license.properties." This warning should be ignored.

I've listed the links below for two unrelated videos online covering presentations by Seth Godin and Dick Hardt.  Since I felt they both were great presentations, I thought it would be a good idea to share the links.

The Etech conference started today, but I'm currently not at the show. Today they're running the training sessions, with the presentations starting tomorrow. I didn't sign up for the training, plus today was the 'big day' for a client of mine. We are working through a transition between the system I built for them (which handles travel reservations) to their new system (handles their internal business and their Website).  So it's key that I stay here just incase they need to roll back to their old system.

• Marketing provides an opportunity for engineering
• Permission Marketing - users provide permission, marketers/advertisers have the opportunity to participate in that market.
• Emotional Marketing - selling the story and buying the story, that's how markets funtion unless is feeding or sheltering people.

Unless you've been a Web slinger for a few years, you might have missed out on the term "Spider Bait."  Spider Bait can happen a few ways, but the main function is to fill Web pages up with keywords and get search engine 'spiders' to index them.  A spider is a program that browses the Web and follows links based on rules and criteria. While crawling, it stores your Web pages and information about your Web pages in the search engine's database for use in the search engine.

When this first started happening, back in hmm... 96/97, I had some clients that wanted me to do this.  I tried to talk them out of it, but the client wanted it done. Even worse, they wanted me to do it the sneaky way - by setting the text color to the color of the background, and filling the bottom of the site with around 500+ keywords and phrases.  Fortunately, the client requested it to be removed after a few months - which was a good move, because the search engines were catching on.

Spider Bait was getting out of hand to the point that some seach engines stated that they would stop indexing your site if it was filled with keywords, while some evolved their spiders to ignore such clusters of words.  Once these methods were put in place, the effectiveness of Spider Bait began to diminish - and, in some cases, it caused sites to vanish from the search engines. It was an end to the Spider Bait problem, or so it seemed.

Just last week, while researching for a new site I'm launching, I was searching Google using the words "music hosting." Since I'm curious about the top listed sites, I visit each one to see if there's anything I can learn from them - why they are at the top - who links to them, etc. The fifth listing, Sectionz.com is what this posting is all about.

If you click on the link, you'll be taken to a modern day Spider Bait page. WTF?!?

Yes, it's true, Spider Bait will take you to the top of Google, today, in 2005.

What makes that page Spider Bait? take a look, or, look at this screenshot:

1. The page is filled with keywords that relate to the site.

2. Each keyword is linked to a page where the file is the same name as the link.

3. None of these links go anywhere except to other Spider Bait pages.

4. Every Spider Bait page is the same, even the header text, they simply swap the keywords.

I'm surpised on a few fronts. First, because this can still work. Second, that it's working on GOOGLE! and Thirdly, I'm surprised that Sectionz.com would be doing this. Actions like this are not good for artists or music fans.

If you want to be the best, then be the best, shortcuts will always cut again.