Adam Searle » Blog

All three are free and relatively easy to set up, and will help you bring in and track traffic to your site.

1. Google Analytics
Analytics is a free monitoring tool for your website, tracking the what-where-when of viewers coming to your site. Hits are recorded in terms of unique viewers, returning viewers, how many times certain pages are viewed, and how long users spend on your site. The geographical report graphically shows where your viewers are in the world. Entry points are monitored, both in terms of the page people arrive at, and how they arrived at your site - directly or from referring websites. Search engine statistics tell you what keywords people are using to find you and from which search engine.

For example, I know that in the last month I’ve had 572 visits, 77 of which were from the US and 64 from Australia. The average viewer spend 5 minutes on my site, and 90% of them were first time viewers. 27% came from a referral site, the most popular of which was Ninjaman. 12% came from search engines - the most common search being ‘adam searle’ - with Google being the most useful to me. Very useful software.

If like me your website or blog is based on Wordpress, try the Google Analytics Plugin for Wordpress.

2. Google Sitemaps
Sitemaps is a tool designed to aide google and other search engines in the navigation and indexing of your site. Using the tools provided on their site, you generate a sitemap.xml file that is then placed on the root level of your site. Search engines (other than google too) find this file and then have a better idea of all. You can read more about the theory behind sitemaps here. Additionally the Google Sitemap interface gives an insight into Googles record of you, and which sites link to you. The PageRank system that google is based on favours other, preferably reputable sites linking you - so this is useful in building relationships with key partners.

There is an excellent plugin for Wordpress that generates a Google Sitemap file, puts it in the right place, and notifies Google that you have updated your sitemap. Check out Google Sitemap Generator.

3. Google Adsense
Adsense is Googles advertising platform, enabling you to easily add a revenue source to your site. While I dont use this here, over at ninja-man.com we generate a healthy revenue stream that covers bandwidth costs etc involved in hosting the game. You’ll want to be bringing in at least a thousand views a month in order to make it worthwhile hitting your users with ads.

Check those out, and happy blogging!

After a seemingly eternal wait, I’m happy to annouce I’ve now begun my research break. I’ve stepped down from day to day duties as a developer at Subversive for the time being, and am generally on a hiatus from freelance work. Additionally this semester I’m not teaching. I’ll be free to give my undivided attention to new and exciting things that I’ve been waiting to look into.

First thing on the cards is to brush up on my PHP and back-end coding. My experiences in working over the last year have highlighted how valuable it would be to have flash dev + php dev knowledge; providing a rounded web app development skillset. After that, I can finally dive into the world of Actionscript 3. Collin Moock’s Essential Actionscript 3.0 is finally shipping from Amazon, and I got my copy the other week, horrah! The possibilities in Actionscript are extremely interesting - when you combine a collosal installed userbase (85%+ of users online have Flash 9 so far), with a huge advance in code execution speed and capabilities, there is huge potential.

I look forward to posting about my research!

Wow, how does time pass! And damn has a lot of time passed. I’ve been too wrapped up to blog lately, so lets quickly recap…

At some point, I finished season 5 of 24. Hotness! Season 6 will rock. Long wait till jan 06 tho

Played poker for the first time. Interesting. And yeah for money. Something I’m going to have to work on a lot though to become decent!

Surprise bday for fiona was last saturday, which was great! Totally well planned on my behalf and executed by hooj and myself It was all under the pretense of dinner with the two of us and her, when surprise… everyone turned up in a lift. Moving the surprise away from the restaurant was key. Can’t reveal anymore, trade secrets, future plans, yada yada.

Work was fuckin intense. Saturday-Sunday I was meant to be working on a project for amnesty international, via digital eskimo (current place I’m freelancing for). Saturday turned into not a lot, and sunday-monday-tuesday suddenly became very very intense. At one point I’d worked 40hrs in 72hrs. Every shift was over 12hrs really, the top being 17hrs! Finally I was able to sleep all wednesday when it was over. I’m very happy with how it turned out, check it out: http://message.amnesty.org.au They were aiming for 10,000 signatures over the 11 days it was to be up - they got it in about a day. At the time of writing, its 15000+

Started teaching! Yep for those who don’t know UNSW picked me as a lecturer/tutor for a new course, intro to flash design. So every thursday I’ll be on the spot trying to teach people flash. First lesson went quite well. No difficulties in the talking aspect (think of it as a three hour presentation, only with no teacher to ‘throw back to’ - its just you), but keeping everyone entertained through difficulty of what you’re showing is tricky. An inherent problem in having some students with experience in flash, others without - we have to presume without. Roped Jason into it so he’ll be giving a few too, starting next week!

Was asked to guest speak for professional portfolio at cofa. Got that coming up in a few weeks. Talking about the uber success that is our ninjaman (yeah, I like to brag about it lately lol. 25 million plays? more? dunno! :P)

Got my laptop at some point over these last few weeks. Loving being portable once more. Got the base level macbook, upped the HDD, and threw in 2gb ram after-market. Great to have a laptop feel as speedy as your desktop. Smaller than all my previous powerbooks too, which is nice. Great to take into work when freelancing - so it comes in handy. Certainly regularly used now.

Saw russell peters live a while ago. Fantastic!! Might go see him again in December when he comes back

Went and saw the sydney symphony the other night at the opera house - “Music in movies”. Tickets thanks to my pals at eskimo (for their/my work on symphony stuff lately). The finale was all about star wars - my god the star wars theme song sounds amazing when played live by a full orchestra. Totally the bomb! I’d never heared an orchestra live before… it was a bit dry until that, but very enjoyable
And in uber-geek news, got my new phone!! Sony Ericsson K800, and I totally love it. Built in 3mp camea with xenon flash (lights up a pitch black room great - powerful). High res screen, 3g connectivity, got a bunch of russell peters clips on it for watching. Generally just much newer tech. Nice for me and great for R&D that I’ll be doing for my company! Oh and the K800 has built in integration with blogger.com - take a pic, click ‘blog this’, and up here it goes:
http://mobilechill.blogspot.com
My new mobile blog for uploading photos to while out and about. Check it out. A slightly alien one of my cat currently
That’s all for now - massive brain dump after a looong 2 weeks. Still more stuff I haven’t covered but will later. Started a massage course. Soon to start a public speaking course (peoples #1 most common fear be damned). Full time company work commencing next week (slowing freelance work right down). Lots going on, very busy, but still enjoying it!