The 2008 Elections – Indexed for your reading pleasure…
By Brian | February 8, 2008
I’ve been a big fan of Jessica Hagy, author of the Indexed blog, for some time. Now, she’s done a 2008 Election roundup for alt.campaign which is excellent. Here’s my favorite, but you should definitely click through and see them all.
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Referral URLs in Blogger
By Brian | February 7, 2008
For months now, I’ve been missing the ability to look at a particular page (or post) on my site, and find out exactly what page is driving people to visit it. My old Yahoo! GeoCities stats provided that capability, but Google Analytics never did. The best it would do is tell me which domains were sending traffic my way, and even that didn’t happen on a page by page basis, only for the site as a whole. Also, the Navigation Summary stats are somewhat flawed, since they always seem to suggest that the most popular source for a page (and the most popular destination) is the page itself. So either I’ve got lots of readers who click Reload a lot, or they’ve got a bug.
But all that has changed thanks to Reuben Yau, who has offered two ways to achieve this goal. The first is to use Google Analytics’ Filters function, which puts the referral URL in the “User Defined Value” section. The second involves modifying the tracking code that GA puts on each page on your site, in order to embed the referral URL in the existing stats. This seemed more complicated and more invasive, so I went with the first option and in just one day, I’m getting all the information I wanted (including specific search queries from the likes of Google, Ask, Yahoo and others that drove people to specific pages).
Reuben’s awesome post provides not only instructions, but screen shots on the setup process and resulting stats, so you can be sure you got things right.
Way to go, Reuben!
Categories: Tech Talk | 1 Comment »
Count von Count gets nasty…
By Brian | February 5, 2008
This is probably as close to this blog comes to off-color humor, although there’s technically nothing dirty in here at all. That said, I laughed so hard I nearly choked:
Ladies and gentlemen, Sesame Street’s Count von Count discussing what he does when the kids aren’t watching:
(hat tip: Vicky Parysek)
Categories: Random Acts of Blogging | 1 Comment »
James Lileks sums up Super Tuesday
By Brian | February 5, 2008
Once again, James Lileks does a masterful job of describing exactly how I feel about something that’s happening in the world:
“I’m going to vote for President Hillary,” (G)Nat said when we got home. I asked her why.
“Because she is a woman and she seems like a good leader.”
Well, let’s just Godwin the hell out of this for grins.
“Would you vote for Hitler if he was a woman?”
She stopped and glared. DAD.
“I’m not saying she’s anything like Hitler,’ I said. ‘She’s not at all. But would you vote for someone just because they were a woman?”
“And she seems like a good leader I said. Hitler was not a good leader.”
I considered noting that Hitler was an effective shaper of public opinion as well, but decided to ask her what made a good leader.
“Deciding the best things for people.”
We had a little talk about taxes, and she was surprised to find that the President and the Congresses can just take your money. “That’s wrong.”
Sigh. Careful. This is civics, not brainwashing.
“No, it’s not wrong. We all agree to pay taxes for things we need. We don’t always agree on how much to pay, or what to spend them on. But if they take too much, then we can’t go to Disneyworld.”
Okay, now it was brainwashing. Her eyes grew wide. “I vote for Obama.”
“He might raise taxes, too.”
She looked bereft: “who else is there then?”
Welcome to the club, child.
My own 7-year old asked me the other night who I was “rooting for” in today’s election. I told him that we call it “voting” and not “rooting,” and that I really wasn’t sure yet, so I wasn’t going to vote for anyone.
Tough civics lesson, there – I’m sure they’re drilling it into his head that it’s his sacred duty to vote when he turns 18, and here’s Dad telling him he’s abstaining because he has no opinion just yet. The truth is that I knew my ideas lined up pretty well with Rudy Giuliani, but now that he’s not running, I simply don’t know enough about McCain or Romney to make an informed choice. According to Wikipedia (Dems, Reps) there have been a total of 43 debates so far, and what little I’ve seen of them has not encouraged me to watch more. And so I’ll sit out the New Jersey primary, and do my research on the two who are chosen (by others) to run.
I supsect that most people are as uninformed as I am, but are voting today anyway. I’m not sure how I feel about that. If you don’t know anything about the candidates, what’s more important? Excercising your sacred right to vote, or not muddying the results with an uninformed vote? Maybe we should have 43 debates on the topic…
Taking the point a bit further, I also suspect that a significant segment of the population feels informed because they’ve been hearing about poll results for the last nine months, and are simply voting for the person about whom they’ve heard good things lately. Case in point: there was a man on the street corner in front of my train station this morning holding an octag sign. I didn’t have a digital camera with me, but I’ve recreated the sign to the right. Basically, this says to me, “Vote for Obama – he’s winning.”
Of course, people are free to vote for whatever reasons they choose, but if this truly is the trend, I wonder whether all of these opinion polls are affecting the outcome (see the Observer Effect). And if that’s the case, I think perhaps we could do with a little less information about what everyone thinks.
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So how was you’re commute this morning?
By Brian | February 5, 2008
This is Brian Greenberg, blogging live from a very crowded Penn Station in midtown Manhattan. Conditions here are as follows: GIANTS. FANS. EVERYWHERE.
AND no one knows which subway to take, so they’re all standing in the middle of crowded hallways reading directions they printed out off the web, AND they all need to purchase a single-trip Metrocard for the subway, AND none of them know how the machine works, AND I just got hit in the face with a couple of hundred red, white and blue balloons being lugged through the rush hour crowd by some guy with dollar signs in his eyes.
Oh, and I’m pretty sure a bunch of these folks are drunk.
Sigh…Enjoy the parade, folks, I’m late to my 9am meeting.
(P.S. To all you smug commuters that drive or take the bus, note that there’s a party at Giants stadium at 2:30pm this afternoon. Have fun with that traffic on the way home!)
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Hey, Red Sox Nation…
By Brian | February 3, 2008
This one’s for you:
Categories: Sports Talk | 2 Comments »
How People Found Me – January Edition
By Brian | February 3, 2008
The Categories
| Category | January Count | November Count |
| Technology | 221 | 191 |
| Billy Joel | 110 | 237 |
| DSL | 52 | 29 |
| Celebrity Look Alikes | 38 | 49 |
| Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree | 21 | 97 |
| Adult/Porn-Related | 19 | 149 |
| Cal/Stanford | 19 | 25 |
| Politics | 16 | 8 |
| Penn | 15 | 6 |
| Hava Nagila | 12 | 0 |
| Overrated Films | 10 | 18 |
| The Simpsons | 11 | 0 |
| TicTacs | 0 | 14 |
Queries were down slightly this month (662 vs. 783). Billy Joel, who had taken the lead in November (the last time I compiled these stats), has fallen back to a comfortable #2 slot, behind the almighty Technology related queries (why don’t I write about technology more?), and queries about DSL modems in particular surged almost 80% to 52. Queries about the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree seem to have abated (as expected), and Adult/Porn related queries have also dropped off dramatically (almost 90% to a mere 19). The big winners this month were politics (duh…), Hava Nagila (a top ten pop hit in Britain now) and The Simpsons (two posts in a row!).
The Referring Sites
This month’s referring site of the month award goes to CNN.com, who linked to one of my political blog entries via their “Sphere” service.
My only attempt at self-promotion this month was to send my Penn-related Simpsons post to IvygateBlog, who summarily ignored it, choosing instead to show pictures of Kevin Bacon playing ping pong in the frat house he helped immortalize via Animal House. So a big “What am I, chopped liver?” to the folks at IvyGateBlog.
The Keywords
All told, 662 queries resulted in hits to Familygreenberg.com in January (121 less than were used in Novemberr). Here are some of the more entertaining samples:
We start with Technology, this month’s leader in ISBS queries:
| Query | Rank / # of Results | Comments |
| boot camp how to switch back to osx, how to switch back from windows on bootcamp |
>500 / 310,000, >500 / 458,000 |
A perfectionally reasonable thing to Google, but the image of a Mac owner stuck in Windows with no idea how to get back to the Mac OS just makes me laugh |
| excel makro create table | 3 / 990,000 | I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: “I Should Be Sleeping: catering to bad spellers since 2005” |
| numerical format not acknowledged in lotus 123 | 28 / 10,900 | It is well known that the eventual downfall of Lotus 123 was it’s inability to handle numbers. |
| usb wine | >500 / 703,000 | Ah yes, wine. A lovely complement to a fine meal and a kick-ass USB peripheral. Just try to get the keyboard wet… |
| ie smooth scrolling not smooth enough | 25 / 516,000 | What you need is the ironing add-on. Works wonders for smoothing out the scrolling… |
And here are some of the just plain weird ones:
| Query | Rank / # of Results | Comments |
| “beatles” “calculator icon” | 9 / 34 | I honestly have no idea what this guy was even looking for. |
| yakov smirnoff intel | 18 / 1,620 | Same thing here – what could he possibly have been looking for… |
| dealornodeal | >500 / 86,500 | An interesting approach to playing the game. I know people used to use Google for Who Wants to be a Millionaire, but I don’t know if it’s as helpful for this one. |
| flamingos threatened | >500 / 230,000 | OK, you dirty birds, put your legs where I can see ’em. Both of ’em! Do as I say or I’ll turn that pink into a darker shade of red. Catch my drift? |
| graphs and chart on family planning in pakistan 2007 | 46 / 167,000 | It’s good to see responsible Pakistanis doing such careful planning before starting a family. |
| hanson update | 15 / 481,000 | Evidence that the Hanson brothers’ mom uses Google. After all, who else… |
| irish marching bands, levittown,pa. | 19 / 772 | Yes, that’s right. 772 results. You should see Levittown’s St. Patrick’s Day parade… |
| is brian greenberg nice? | 23 / 382,000 | As Dave Barry would say, “I am not making this up.” If you’re still out there, please allow me to say I certainly hope I am! |
| saint valentines day sexist nonsense | 29 / 16,600 | Ironic. This guy (and yes, it has to be a guy) googled in January, and I posted this in February. |
| “self destructing scaffold” | 2 / 2 | Well, that sounds like quite the design flaw, no? |
And finally, the Adult/Porn-Related queries. As I said above, pickings were slim this month, so I had to expand my definition of “Adult” to include alcohol as well as sex. Here you go:
| Query | Rank / # of Results | Comments |
| anheuser busch powerpoint templates | 6 / 1,770 | The technical approach to getting wasted. |
| drunks | >500 / 4,870,000 | The simpler approach (although, I’ll note, he’s still using Google…) |
| brothel + poland | >500 / 128,000 | Hey, cool – the hotel has free Wifi. We’ll use the internet to find things to do here in Warsaw… |
| does ashley tisdale sleep naked | >500 / 173,000 | Oh, come on people – she’s in Disney movies, for pete’s sake… |
| pitchers of nude people | >500 / 150,000 | Three possibilities here: 1) another bad speller, 2) someone’s got an awfully huge pitcher lying around, or 3) Jeffrey Dahmer’s been Googling again… |
| selma hayek + porn look alike | >500 / 73,700 | Your favorite celebrity doesn’t take her clothes off often enough for you? Go find someone who looks like her and does. Ya gotta admit, there’s an element of sheer genius here… |
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Familygreenberg.com Health Check – January Edition
By Brian | February 3, 2008
| Metric | December | January | % Change |
| Visits | 1,452 | 1,245 | -14.26% |
| Pageviews | 2,317 | 1,803 | -22.18% |
| Pages/Visit | 1.6 | 1.45 | -9.25% |
| Avg Time on Site | 0:47 | 0:49 | 4.69% |
| Bounce Rate | 79.68% | 81.77% | -2.62% |
| % New Visitors | 88.29% | 86.99% | -1.48% |
Two down months in a row. Clearly, I need to step up my game. In the “Behind Every Bad Report is a Good Excuse” category, I will note that I basically took the first two weeks of January off, as I was out of town with the family during that time. In fact, if you look at the daily graph (below) of visits per day, you’ll see that December (in green) had January (in blue) beat consistently for the first two weeks, then it became a horserace, and then January took over the lead.
Lesson learned: To paraphrase Dory the Fish: Just keep blogging, just keep blogging…
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A New Take on Valentine’s Day
By Brian | February 3, 2008
Got Anger?
I thought this was a new way to express the male point of view about the Hallmarkiest Hallmark holiday of the year.
Click on the image for more Valentine’s Day gift ideas…
(hat tip: Chris Bellis)
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What a Super Few Days…
By Brian | February 3, 2008
So just about everyone knows that today is Super Sunday. Something about a football game…
As they say in the infomercials, though: “But wait, there’s more!”
Tomorrow, my kids’ school is having “Super Monday,” where the kids are encouraged to wear clothing to signify their favorite sports teams.
The next day, the same school is hosting “Super Tuesday,” wherein they will discuss the election process, civic responsibility, and current events.
Man, Wednesday is going to be a real let down, huh?
UPDATE: I was informed last night that Wednesday is actually Ash Wednesday, so it won’t be ordinary for some. So some folks will make it all the way to Thursday before their next “normal” day. Glad we cleared that up, huh?
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