Skip to main content

Back to Hitslink

For several years I used Hitslink to monitor visitor activity on the sites that I managed but I abandoned them last year because they were no longer relevant to those sites and it was too early for this one.

I had a quick look round this morning and was tempted by Hitsville but decided that it is just too twee. The log analysis set up that comes with the webspace was OK to get us going and some aspects like the failure analysis are still going to be relevant. But now that the site structure is much more complex and there are significant development possibilities we need to get a better handle on visitors experience of the site.

Histlink is a hosted application that relies on embedded code on all the pages of the site you want to monitor. They provide an application which pastes it into your current pages. For the PHP part of the site I just installed it in the footer file that is incorporated into each page on the fly by the server. So it was all set up in a matter of minutes and it is near realtime. So I have seen my own test visit and spotted the visitor who searched on 'listen to paganini caprice' on Yahoo and came and selected the campanella streaming sample. I had almost forgotten how entertaining this can be.

Now we are going to skip to the last of the Debussy's Children's Corner Suite - the Golliwog's Cakewalk as our lofi streaming sample of the day.

We'll feature the new Ragtime tunes next week together with highlights from Hitslink.

Popular posts from this blog

Adding to the collection or ...

There are more opportunities to add to this collection but we think that it is now time to make some additional payment options available. For low cost items, credit card transactions are rather expensive so we will need to trade the benefits to us of larger orders against a premium for individual track purchases. This means adding shopping cart facilities along side the simple BitPass functionality and is going to be a bit of a programming challenge. More of this anon - in the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - first movement of No3 from Johann Sebastian Bach himself and our arrangement on steel drums and marimba - full HiFi track only 0.99$(US).

Shop Re-opens

The PHP upgrade on my server precipitated closure of the shop for a couple of weeks but I finally found the time to work through the backlog of OS Commerce upgrades that I had been putting off and Lo and Behold the shop is working again. I still need to do a bit of testing on the shopping cart arithmetic and make sure that the downloading is still working properly after the changes I have made. I'll also have a look at the recent contributions to see if there are any other improvements I should be making. In the mean time there has been another surge of Ranking changes on Google as reported on Rankpulse and it is evident that our rankings continue to swing around on a daily basis but our overall position and visitor numbers seem pretty stable - even the shop closure didn't seem to have much of an impact.

Out of Beta

Blogger is out of beta and that was pretty painless. The new features look quite interesting so we'll give them a go shortly. No collaborators on the search engine yet so I think we'll do a page on the main site and see what we can achieve from there. My news group post killed the thread I responded to - so nothing from that source either. An index page update was picked up by Google the following day so we seem to have all that part of the system sorted and I finally got round to tidying up the title and description so that might generate more responses. We are ending the year on over 2000 visitors a week on the main site but not many on this blog - I'm really doing it for my personal benefit now but it helps to imagine that anyone could come along and read it. In fact I suspect that we have far more readers of individual pages thrown up by searches than we do regular readers.