Net Sieve

I’m going to give FireStats a go to track this site. It sounds good from the features page:

• FireStats protect the privacy of your users, unlike services like Google analytics.
• Basic hit statistics (hits ever, in last 24 days etc)
• Recent popular pages
• Recent referers
• Browser and OS trees, grouped by what matters
• IP to country – know where your visitors are surfing from (New)
• A list of recent hits
• Excluding unwanted hits from the display
  • By IP address
  • By Logged in user (to be used mostly to filter blog administrator(s))
  • By user-agent (to be used to filter bots)
• Import statistics from Counterize, to allow easy migration.
• Ajax UI, no need to reload the whole page – just press the ‘refresh statistics’ button to get the latest data.
• Designed to work on all browsers. (Tested on Firefox, Explorer, Opera and Konqueror)
• Internationalization ready (Translating to additional languages is easy)

If I encounter any grief, I’ll let you know. Or if this site suddenly disappears that may be all the warning you get. Now let’s crunch those numbers.

Ok, I don’t know why they make applying this plugin this so difficult. I’m refusing to believe that it’s just me, but when I create a WordPress blog from Fantastico (all y’all with cpanel will know) I don’t get an API key to activate Akismet and it gets all cranky with me.

Akismet is a righteous splog blocker and it comes free with every account. You just access it from the plugins option in your dashboard. But as far as I can tell, if you haven’t signed up for a WordPress blog from their site, you don’t automatically get a key. What am I missing? Help me out here.

WordPress tells you that you can find your API key in the “your account/your profile” option, but I got nuthin. I used the API key from a previous account and it seems to be working. Unfortunately I may be breaking some hidden TOS somewhere and will likely cause the end of the world.

Here’s to no splog in the afterlife.

If you’ve been looking for the tool to create a world map that pin points where in the world your visitors are coming from, try Digital Point Solution’s Geo Visitors code.

With a simple copy and paste of some html you’ll get a small, clickable graphic bar that opens to a world map. The color of the tags on the map represent how recent the visit was. It’s a fun tool and it’s free.

For you Mac users who are feeling that I’m neglecting you in this whole Web 2.0 thang… here’s a bone. A meager one, it’s true, but you can’t deny the love is here.

Google Dashboard Widgets for Mac

(See how I even made that bold?)

Google says: “Widgets are mini-applications that you download and install into Dashboard to add new functionality. Have fun using these widgets!”

Widgets listed:

Blog to Blogger

Gmail at a glance

Search history

Enjoy. <— Not a widget.

The blog Widgets for WordPress has some timesaving tinkerings for your blog. Take some time for this visit, because the lists are extensive. One widget that caught my eye was the Chitika eMiniMalls plug. Here’s a snippet:
Income « WordPress Widgets

I don’t usually try every widget that comes across my desk but I had to take this one for a test drive. It’s quite a treat for me, especially after writing all of the simple widgets that come with the plugin, to see a widget so rich with features. It’s a multi-widget so you can have up to nine of them. The pop-up control panel lets you choose from several sizes and set up your own colors so that your widget fits beautifully with any theme. It has an Advanced mode for setting up keyword-based ad filtering and an AJAX form for testing your keywords without leaving the widget control panel. This is good stuff.

Go visit for the rest of the scoop.

Need some great/outrageous/creative minds to tackle a problem for you? For free brainstorming ideas from around the globe, visit Brainreactions.net. Once you create a free account you can launch a question, gather as many ideas as you need and then close the question. Here’s an example of one brainstorming session (your results may vary):

How to make cheap or free publicity for a sport school to attract new members?

8. Invite coaches from all over the country to your sports school to share ideas on what works and what doesn’t work in sports teaching/coaching … sort of like a best-practices forum.

7. To build on the contest idea, maybe hold weekly contests/matches and create mini leagues representing different geographical areas that compete at your sports school

6. Organize a contest of some sort at your school and ask all local school children to participate. Let’s say, something like a mini local olympics which have easy to do contests like long jump, high jump, races, etc.

5. Do a before and after profile on your website every month where you show score improvements of students who have attended your sports school

4. Invite guest trainers who are celebrity sportstars or retired coaches

3. posters

2. business cards

1. flyers

While it wouldn’t be wise to post anything you need to keep secret. the ideas here are free for the taking. Not to mention, the exercise of answering a few questions will stimulate your thought processes. Win and win.

OK, it’s clear that I’m a Craigslist geek and I’m always looking for ways to enhance the experience. We all know it’s not the easiest site to keep up with.

craig2mail.com is a great site to have selected searches sent to your email whenever an item or post matches your search criteria. There’s only one downside – if it really is a downside, I haven’t decided yet – you can only set up one search per email. They say:

This site is NOT owned by or affiliated with craigslist.org. This site is simply a tool to do automatic craigslist searches made by a guy who spent too much time manually searching craigslist and still always got beat to the good stuff. I like Ebay but in many ways craigslist is better. One function that Ebay has that’s really great is the ability to get email notifications when something you want is advertised. For those of you who haven’t figured it out already…that is what this site is about. Submit a craigslist search and we send you an email notification every time a matching ad is posted to craigslist. You will get a copy of the ads text in your email and if it is something you want all you have to do is click the link at the bottom of the email to go straight to craigslist where you can contact the post’s author.

craig2mail.com has a strict spam policy. They don’t. Give it a try.

This is so cool, it’s hard to believe it’s real. Progressive Direct has partnered with Universal Studios Home Entertainment to create a damage guage for car crashes into the HD DVD release of “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.” Watch your insurance repair costs go truly fast and furious!

As cars smack into one another in Tokyo, a display in a small window keeps track: “Roof repair: $209, taillights: $451, fender: $618.” The calculator is labeled “Progressive Direct: Insurance Damage Estimates.”

This is a really cool and innovate way to advertise within games where you actually add interest to gameplay instead of detracting from it. Of course, it’s a way to sell auto insurance but its inobtrusiveness is creative. The digital gauge – which users can disable when desired – is the first in what Universal and other studios hope is a stream of branded interactive features on their new DVDs.

Buying car insurance online is nothing new. Neither is the regular form of advertising. As the creators stated, you can’t run the same ads over and over. Consumers become blind to them and the storage capacity of DVD and other media make it possible to create interactive and fun ads. Car insurance… how cool is that?

This cool info was tipped by CarInsurance.com – where you can get online car insurance rates and buy online, any time.

Seomoz has some great tools and this one is particularly cool – to me anyway, I know you guys are much more hip. Anyhoo, this is what it gives you:

• The Relative Importance/Visibility of a Webpage
• The Potential Strength/Ability of a Page to Rank in the Search Engines
• Data on Popularity, Links & Mentions of the Page Across the Web

The tool is designed to satisfy the curiosity of webmasters, surfers and web marketing professionals seeking a better metric to quickly assess a site/page’s relative importance and visibility.

Seomoz’ Page Strength

I just hit on a helpful little site – iTools.com – offering a nice search package in a compact space. iTools gives you “quick access to the best Internet tools” including:

• map tools
• financial tools
• search tools
• language tools
• research tools
• and, yes, even more.

When I hit up the research tools, I found a search for legal definitions, Nolo’s Law Encyclopedia, About.com, newspapers, biographies… and on. I’m spending more time here. Nice work