Google Trends: A valuable tool for webmasters and bloggers

Posted on May 23, 2007 | Filed Under Web

Google Labs does it again with their recent unveiling of Google Trends.  Google Trends will give users the inside scoop on what search terms are hot, and how hot.

If you are a webmaster or blogger trying to increase your exposure, this type of information is key.  You can see not only what terms the world is searching for, but what the trend of those search terms has been over time.  Additionally, you can compare up to five different search terms to see how they compare in terms of trend.

Here is what Google says about the service:

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

Here are some links for more information:

About Google Trends (includes FAQs)
Google Trends Discussion Group

And for something interesting, here is the Google Trends data on the terms “google trends.” Interestingly, when I looked at it, the “Hotness” was ranked as a mere “mild.”  I would have expected more from a newly released data tool.

I’ll be looking forward to some type of API for this from Google Labs.

Bugmenot.com

Posted on March 29, 2006 | Filed Under Web

Here is an interesting service. I’ll leave it up to the individual as to whether you feel this is ethical or not. Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just pointing out this exists.

Are you annoyed when you go to view a news article on a newspaper site (like chicagotribune.com or nytimes.com) and be prompted to login or register “free”?‚  What do you think the cost is of giving up your email (and other miscellaneous and sundry personal information) is?
Bugmenot.com – bypass compulsory registration with these free passwords

Date-O-Matic Javascript Day/Date Display

Posted on January 13, 2006 | Filed Under Web

This is a very simple date script that I wrote years ago. I have used it in some form or another on just about every site that I have worked on. It is a nice, simple, client-side javascript to display the day and the date.

To use it, place the following in the of your html document:


In the location that you want the date to display, place the following:

This will output the date. You can apply CSS to the output as necessary, or, for those lacking the necessary skills, you could wrap this with a (yuck!) tag.

Obviously (or maybe not so obvious), there are a number of changes one could make based on desired output. For example, the days or months could be abbreviated in the script if you wanted “Thurs, Jan 12, 2006″. Or, the more savvy could change it to an output of “Thursday – 1/12/2006″ by changing the month names to appropriate numbers and then changing the document.write section to:

document.write(d[today.getDay()]+" - ");
document.write(m[today.getMonth()]+"/");
document.write(today.getDate()+"/");
document.write(""+today.getFullYear());

Or, if you need scientific or European dating, switch the date and the month lines to get this:

document.write(d[today.getDay()]+" - ");
document.write(today.getDate()+"/");
document.write(m[today.getMonth()]+"/");
document.write(""+today.getFullYear());

If you are an old javascript hack, you probably had all that figured out (or already wrote your own), but if you are a js noob, tinkering with the output and maybe adding or subtracting from it, is a good way to “get under the hood” so-to-speak and learn how to use javascript.

Have fun!

XAMPP

Posted on August 15, 2005 | Filed Under Web

Do you need a packaged installation of Apache, mySQL, PHP, and Perl? Complete with its own control panel? Packaged for Windows? Easy to install?

Asking for the moon, aren’t you?

But wait… Apache Friends has something for you! A freely downloable package of open source web tools is available at http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html.

Sage: a feed reader for Firefox

Posted on June 2, 2005 | Filed Under Web

Back in my (not so long ago) IE days, I was using Pluck as an RSS reader. I liked it, it was handy. Now that I switched to Firefox, I had to find something for RSS. Nice thing about Firefox, there are a lot of plugins available.

Sage seems to fit the bill. It has a sidebar for the feeds like Pluck did in IE. So far, so good. If you use Firefox (you do use Firefox, don’t you?), Sage would be a nice plugin to add. If you know of a better RSS reader for Firefox, let me know.

Sage: a feed reader for Firefox