markwilson.it

Tag: Useful Websites

  • Why webstats are so interesting

    I’ve been writing this blog for a couple of years now. With over 500 posts, it’s consumed a scary amount of my time, but at least it’s finally something useful to do with the markwilson.co.uk domain that I first registered back in the late ’90s when I was thinking of leaving my job and working as a freelance IT contractor!

    Over time I’ve tried to move towards a standards-compliant website, with lots of information that people find useful. I’ve still got some way to go – not being a developer, my code is not as standards-compliant as I’d like it to be (although the website that I have been working on recently with my buddy Alex should soon be pretty much there from a CSS and XHTML standpoint) and the usefulness of the content is totally subjective (but the blog started out as a dumping ground for my notes and that’s still its primary purpose – if others find it useful then that’s great and the trickle of Google AdSense/PayPal revenue is always welcome).

    From time to time I look at the website statistics (webstats) for the site and always find them an interesting read. I can’t claim to be an expert in search engine optimisation (nor do I want to be) but the Webalizer webstats that my ISP provides are great because they let me see:

    • How many hits I’m getting (not surprisingly I get more hits after I post new articles and less when I’m busy with work or other projects) on a monthly, daily or hourly basis.
    • The HTTP response codes that Apache dishes out (200s are good, 404s are bad).
    • The top 30 URLs that are being hit (not surprisingly /blog is number 1, but it also helps to see pages that account for lots of bandwidth but not much traffic – the ones where maybe I should be looking at optimising the code).
    • Entry and exit pages (there’s a big correlation between these two, so obviously I’m not encouraging enough browsing of the site).
    • Where people visit from (mostly crawlers, although unfortunately I can see how the stats are skewed by my own broadband connection at number 18 because I use the site so much to look things up for myself).
    • Who is referring visitors to me.
    • What people are looking for when they get referred here.
    • What browser people are using.
    • Where people are visiting from.

    This information lets me understand which pages are most popular as well as highlighting technical issues with the site but it doesn’t always go far enough.

    Some time ago, I applied for a Google Analytics (formerly Urchin) account and last week I finally set it up. Whilst the Webalizer stats are still useful in many ways for me as a website administrator, the Google Analytics information is much richer. For example, I no longer need my ClustrMaps map because I can see a geomap along with my pages per visit ratio, how many visitors return and who sends them here. For marketeers there are tools to track campaigns and see how they are progressing, and I can also find a whole load of technical information about my visitors (e.g. connection speed used, browser, platform, java and flash capabilities, language, screen colours and resolution – all of which can help in decisions as to what features should be incorporated in future). There’s also information about how long visitors spent viewing a particular page (in fact there are so many reports that I can’t list them all here).

    So, what have I learned from all of this – well, from Google Analytics I can see that most of you have a broadband connection, are using Windows (94%), IE (65%, vs. 29% for Firefox), view the site in 32-bit colour and have a screen resolution of 1024×768. That means that most of you should be able to see the content as I intended. I also know that people tend to visit a single page and then leave the site and that Google is my main referrer. Webalizer tells me that Apache gave a strange error 405 to someone this month (somebody obviously tried to do something they shouldn’t be trying to do) but also some 404s (so maybe I have some broken links to investigate). I can also tell that (for the IP addresses that could be resolved) most of my visitors were from Western Europe or the United States but hello to everyone who has visited this month from Australia, China, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates.

    I hope this has illustrated how website statistics can be useful, even for small-time website operators like me and I encourage you to check out Webalizer (which reads Apache web server log files) and Google Analytics (which needs some JavaScript to be added to the website code). Alternatives (e.g. for IIS users) include AWstats and Christopher Heng also has a list of free web statistics and web log analysers on his site.

  • How to (radically) change the Windows XP graphical user interface

    Earlier today, I saw one of my colleagues running what looked like the new Windows Vista graphical user interface on his Windows XP PC and it turned out to be one of the many visual enhancements available from CrystalXP.Net. I haven’t installed any of them yet, but may well give them a go soon as it looks like there’s some really impressive Windows interface customisation available, along with artwork based on Tux the Linux penguin and other mascots.

  • Where has the Windows User Group – Nordic gone?

    Johan Arwidmark is a Microsoft MVP, who has published a lot of good advice over the years on RIS, Windows PE and other deployment technologies. I’ve found some of this content really useful and have linked to it in the past but last year Johan’s Windows User Group – Nordic website went offline. A whois lookup shows that it is registered to a company called Lutteman Consulting AB, whose website still links to the Windows User Group – Nordic forum but the link is dead (it used to be available under both the .com and .net TLDs).

    I needed that information, so I e-mailed Johan to find out where it had gone. I didn’t expect a reply (and didn’t get one either), so I searched for copies of Johan’s articles that had been cached by Google (what a great feature that is!). In doing so, I stumbled some of the articles, republished on MyITForum, where Johan’s bio mentions that he now works for TrueSec AB, whose website proudly proclaims (under news from 16 September 2005) that:

    “Sveriges främsta expert inom deployment är rekryterad till TrueSec. Johan är en av fÃ¥ i världen utsedd till Microsoft MVP pÃ¥ deployment.Johans kompetens förstärker TrueSecs förmÃ¥ga att leverera optimerade klient och serverinstallationer för kunder med behov av säkerhet.”

    For those who don’t read Swedish, that roughly translates to say that Sweden’s foremost expert in deployment has been recruited to TrueSec, before continuing that Johan was nominated as a Microsoft MVP on deployment in a global poll and his competency enhances TrueSec’s power to deliver optimised client and server installations for clients who need security.

    Anyway, for those who don’t want to be cybersleuths, tracking down lost information (I got lucky really), for Windows User Group – Nordic, check out Google’s cached results.

  • Understanding ‘net lingo

    Some time ago, I linked to the parent’s primer to computer slang and the netiquette 101 for new netizens. Well, as I dive ever deeper into the world of the ‘net, I’m constantly coming up against acronyms that I don’t understand and variations on smileys/emoticons that I haven’t seen before. That’s where the Net Lingo dictionary of Internet terms has helped me a few times recently, providing acronyms, text messaging shorthand, the most extensive list of emoticons I’ve ever seen (as well as assicons and boobicons – I’m sure you can work out what they are!) and a substantial dictionary of Internet terms.

  • Resources for Solaris newbies

    A few weeks back, I blogged that I was trying out Solaris 10 on a spare PC. I haven’t spent a lot of time with the product yet, but so far I’m impressed. I’m sure I’ll be writing more as I get to grips with Unix – an operating system family that I haven’t used in anger for many years.

    I also began to gather a collection of Solaris hints and tips, ‘net resources and the like. This is my list so far (some of these are written for SPARC but most should apply to the x86 version too):

    Some of these I found myself, others have been recommended by Unix sysadmins and architects, who by and large seem keen to help a Microsoftie learn about Unix (actually, I did a fair amount of Unix system programming at uni’, but that was a long time back). The other comments that I got back were that Linux is also “grown up” contender these days (and I’ve been suitably adminished for suggesting otherwise)!

    Indeed, a couple of people have suggested that the best way to learn Solaris would be to start out with one of the main Linux distributions to get the hang of the start-up, configuration and shell. Ubuntu seems to be well recommended, as is Mandriva and SUSE. Apparently the Ubuntu route allows trade up to full Debian (“expert class” when you get there). Knoppix is an even easier way in – basically Debian on a live CD – impossible to mess up! Following that, Solaris is a case of working out what’s different. One sysadmin who had been through this journey commented that he now uses Gentoo at home “100% roll your own, compile everything from scratch”.

    I did actually have a play with a couple of the Unix/Linux live CDs last week. One was eLux NG embedded Linux but far more impressive was the Sun Java Desktop live CD that Alex gave me – running Morphix 0.4 (based on Knoppix).

    Getting back to Solaris, printed reference manuals (i.e. books) seem thin on the ground (although as can be seen from the list above, there is plenty on of material the ‘net). One which has been recommended to me is Solaris 10: The Complete Reference but I haven’t looked at it myself and the Amazon reviews for this are all very poor, commenting that this is really a Solaris 9 reference with very little new for Solaris 10 and suggesting that some other Solaris 10 books should be considered instead.

  • Want to improve your Google search results?

    Have you ever wanted to improved your Google search results? I don’t mean getting a page to appear higher on Google’s rankings, but have you ever wondered why Google returns several million results from a search? To narrow things down a bit, try some of the tips from the Thoughtful Solutions Google searching quick reference card.

  • Infrastructure essentials

    Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that I keep a close eye on what the Microsoft UK IT professional technical evangelist team is up to and John Howard’s blog is one of many that I tend to watch. Since August, John has been posting a series of infrastructure essentials blogcasts to help administrators set up a well-managed infrastructure using Active Directory along with common Microsoft products like ISA Server 2004 and Exchange Server 2003. At the time of writing, John has reached 25 infrastructure essentials blog casts – watch out for more. John covers Windows (client and server), Virtual Server, Virtual PC and Identity Integration Server but it’s also worth checking out are Steve Lamb’s blog (security) and Eileen Brown’s blog (management, messaging, mobility and real time collaboration).

  • Blog updates now available via e-mail

    Readers of the HTML version of this blog may have noticed the FeedBlitz details which appeared yesterday under the syndication header on the left side of the screen. FeedBlitz is a service which I’m trying out to provide a daily digest of blog updates via e-mail. Hardline bloggers may not see a need for this (after all, isn’t RSS the transport of choice for bloggers?) but e-mail is one of the Internet’s killer applications and I quite like the idea of getting a single daily e-mail which details the updates to the blogs that I read – and it’s a great idea for people who might be interested in hearing when a site is updated, but who don’t have a feed reader, don’t understand what RSS is, or are just generally confused by anything other than basic e-mail and web browsing services.

    If you would like to receive updates in this way, enter your e-mail address below and click the subscribe button for a daily digest of new posts to this blog:

  • Geotagging websites

    A couple of weeks back, a little GeoURL icon was added the side panel of this blog (underneath the feedmap). GeoURLs are a way of encoding location information within a website.

    For example, whilst I try to make the information on markwilson.co.uk applicable to a wider audience, inevitably some of it is UK-specific. Geolocation by IP address can help to match users with localised content, but it does have some issues. A DNS lookup on markwilson.co.uk tells me that it is an alias for hp.force9.net (212.159.8.1). Using the CAIDA Internet geographic database (NetGeo) to look up 212.199.8.1 tells me that this address is actually allocated to Force 9 Internet in Sheffield, UK (latitude 53.38, longitude -1.50) but that’s not much help for localising services as that’s where my ISP is registered (it may not even be the location of their servers) and I’m nowhere near there. In addition, the CAIDA database is also no longer maintained, so other tools may be more appropriate, but of far more interest is the location to which the site’s information applies.

    For locating an Internet site or service (such as a location-specific web page or RSS feed), geolocation using geotags is probably more applicable. For markwilson.co.uk, the actual code which identifies the geoURL (the geo-structure tag or geotag) is found in the HTML head and reads:

    <meta name="geo.position" content="52.1542;-0.7122" />
    <meta name="geo.region" content="GB" />
    <meta name="geo.placename" content="Olney" />

    These geotags can be generated using the geotag generator (I found out the latitude and longitude using multimap). It’s also possible to use an ICBM tag such as <meta name="ICBM" content="52.1542, -0.7122" /> but geo-structure tags are newer and also include region (using the ISO-3166-1 country names and region names specifications) and placename information.

    GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory (although at the time of writing it only lists 211,991 sites). A GeoURL lookup on markwilson.co.uk returns a list of sites located nearby and although it’s of limited use at the moment, as more and more sites are geotagged, information like this will become more and more relevant, particularly when combined with services such as Google Maps.

  • Introduction to password cracking

    I just read a very interesting article on password cracking techniques on the IBM website. It doesn’t contain any information that isn’t already well known, but it’s still a useful summary of some of the issues which an administrator should be prepared for and how to prevent them.