I have been watching my server traffic logs a bit over the last week or two. They are normally interesting to view once in a while, but I pay more attention to Google Analytics for my actual traffic reports.

I do think that Google misses some traffic, but most of the missed traffic probably shouldn’t count anyway. I think that there are people that hit the page and bounce before Analytics realizes they are there. Google instructs to place the code at the bottom of the page just before the body closing tag. That means that the Google script will be the last thing read when the page is rendered. The code is javascript, and as such could be placed in the head section of the page. It would be read before the page is actually rendered in that case and catch more of the flash thoughts.

At any rate, the information that I pick up from the logs tells much more about the server activity. In the server logs you see all of the activity of the web crawlers and spiders. There is a lot of robot activity that mostly never shows in Analytics because the pages are not actually opened, just downloaded to the indexing server.

On my blogs I also see some other traffic that does not show up in analytics. These are the tracks of the comment spammers. I have come to the conclusion that there is a list somewhere of direct addresses to comment pages of blogs. These comment spammers come in through the back door directly to the comment page. They leave their spam comments without ever reading a post or visiting the actual blog. Probably some or most of these are automated. They all leave their tracks in the server log.

This blog has now been hit over 6,000 times with comment spam. I don’t have to deal with most of that because my anti-spam software dumps many of them directly. It does leave a few for my decision. In most cases I choose ‘delete permanently’ but if there is some relation to an actual post I occasionally approve one.

I have recently posted a comment guideline page on all of my blogs. That will not make any difference to the comment spammers, but the fact that the page is there makes me feel better about deleting the spam.

Blog commenting is a viable way to attract traffic to a site if it is done properly. Comments must be real and address the subject of the post. They need to add value to the post. Too many people just post something quick like “great post” and are off on their merry way. These type of comments add no value to the post or the blog, and are seldom likely to drive any traffic to the posters address.

Do you have problems with comment spam? Do you ever look at your server traffic logs? Leave a ‘quality’ comment.

I put up one more blog today. It has but the one initial post which I did edit quite extensively. I also edited the byline so it does not actually say ‘just another wordpress blog’. I have run across blogs or WordPress sites that still have the defaults in several places, the byline, the initial post, the default about page, and the default comment. I did leave the default comment but will probably delete it if I ever get a real comment.

This blog will be a place to promote electronics deals. I have a couple of blogs that are set up as purely promotional blogs. The posts have been almost exclusively coupon deals or product shouts. I see an occasional visitor, but not enough to have any effect on things. I have been studying this thing for a while now and have come up with what I hope is a better plan for this type of site. If the plan works I will share it with you if I don’t decide to go into the guru business. Without any content it is a bit too early to draw any conclusions as far as this site is concerned.

I put the new blog up on a sub-domain space that has been around for most of a year. The primary domain has been active for over two years, so there is a bit of history. The main sub-domain site was an early attempt at affiliate marketing. I started to put the site together and then got distracted so it has remained an unattractive banner farm site. I did not even complete the info pages that I was building with that style of site when I was working on the strategy.

I have a couple of other sites that I built as well. One has a front page and the banner farm divided into categories. It has attracted few visitors. The other has one of my best accidental domain names. The front page lists categories but also has direct links to the info pages. The category link is to a category directory with a blurb about each advertiser. This one has worked a bit better, but still does not pay the rent. All part of the learning curve.

The new blog can be found under the name Electronic Deals Blog. Go check it out and tell me what you think. I will be going to put up a couple more pages and something in the way of a near real post as soon as I finish here.

I have been testing a couple of WordPress plug-ins on a few of my sites. One of these plug-ins retrieves articles from the iSnare article directory. I have several sites that are receiving articles on a regular basis, but two or three have not seen any new content.

I have looked at the server logs and the iSnare bot does stop by those sites and there does not appear to be a problem as it finds the download script. The categories that I chose for those sites must have little content available.

One of the sites is my old humor site, WebPickups. It has been some time since I posted things to the site on a regular basis. I had hoped to generate some additional traffic. I put up a blog with an initial post explaining the plan and have waited for about a week for the content to start rolling in. Nothing has showed up. The site displays email comedy. Today I added three posts of material that showed up in my inbox. Posting this type of material may take more time in WordPress than to just build an additional page on the main site, but with WordPress there is the RSS shout and the other plug that I am working with adds some other blogs links to the post. This then precipitates a ping to the other blog and, with luck, a trackback to the post.

You can check outs the new posts on the WebPickups Blog if you have any interest. I will be watching my traffic numbers to see if I achieve a boost. The display is slick in WordPress.

What do you think, will this help?

A couple of weeks ago I had found a CMS package called Dolphin7. I had downloaded the file and then not done anything more with it. This evening I decided to investigate a bit more. I went to the site and found their forum. There was some dissatisfaction with a recent policy change voiced on the thread that caught my eye.

I read through that thread and then did a Google search. The search term that I chose had negative connotations and there were plenty of responses. To be entirely fair I should search for positive comments, but what I read along with the comments on the home forum makes me think that I would be well advised to focus my energy in other directions.

The major open source CMS packages include Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, the bed for this blog. I found a couple of comparison sites with notes on all three. There is positive comment on all three packages plus a couple of other options that were mentioned. All three of the biggies have areas where they shine. WordPress is recognized as the leading blogging software and can also be put into service for many website applications. Drupal is represented as the most flexible and powerful in many ways, but has a steeper learning curve and lacks some of the front end polish of the others. Joomla is the prettiest and has many strong features.

From the things that I read I might consider digging into Drupal a bit for a project that I have in mind. This is more of a tech job and the exterior is not quite so important. I may also investigate Joomla a bit more for some other projects where a slick interface is more important. It was an interesting overview of these software packages. Professional developers recommend all three depending on the requirements of the project.

I am reasonably comfortable working with my WordPress blogs. My hobby webmastering has given me enough of a basis in css and coding so that I am not lost. The other packages might push my learning a bit more, but that would not be a bad thing.

Have you used any of these scripts? Tell me your experience in a comment. Thanks!

In my travels I ran across a site called Scribd. This site will publish your ebooks and presentations on their site. They do have a store section if you wish to sell your info products but the primary mode of operation is as an online reading room. They have an online ebook reader and the things posted to the site can be read on the site or are available for download. This is an interesting business model.

I have prepared my first ebook recently. I have offered it as a free download on my Before You Buy a Website site. The ebook is titled ‘Website Basics’ and incorporates an overview of terms that someone thinking of a web presence would need to know. I designed a basic cover page to add to the ebook and uploaded it to Scribd last evening. As I write this there are 14 views listed for the ebook, although at least one of those is mine. You can find my ebook on Scribd by clicking this sentence.

Do you like the Idea of this site? What are your thoughts on Scribd? Please leave a comment.

This is the day that the clock more closely aligns with my personal schedule. Daylight savings time has started for 2010, can spring be far behind?

I have been in a business that is primarily night and weekend work. My schedule is often the reverse of the 9 to 5 crowd. Even when not working I am more the night person than the day person. Having the extra hour of daylight in the evening is a great boon. During the winter darkness falls before I really get moving. Now  I will have more time in my day to get the daylight type things done.

The question about spring reflects this years weather pattern. There have been more heating days than normal here this year. I have lived in Florida for over half my life. I am a warm weather person. Usually there are a few cold days here, but there are nice, warm days in between. Not so much this year. We have seen few days since the first of the year that even reached the 70′s for the daily high and the nights have been colder as a consequence. I want my Florida Back!!

The two new blogs may be found at: About Music Blog and WebPickUps Blog. The call for content has gone out, but I have not seen any articles slide in yet. I will check back later, and if there is anything waiting I will make the post.

I did update the default post on both of the new blogs. One of the links that came up on the music player site was for my main business site, AudioArt Sound. It took me a minute to figure that one out. I got a notification by email that someone had pinged with a link. When I looked at the email the ping had originated on my new blog. That was a bit confusing because I knew that I had not linked to my site yet.

The category that was available for the About Music Blog turned out to be entertainment. I will need to search for more music articles, I think. There are vast libraries of articles available on the web. I chose the humor and sexuality categories for the WebPickUps Blog. We will see if anything funny slides into place.

I put the DoFollow and KeyWordLuv plug-ins on these sites as well as the Deep Link Engine plug. I also invited guest bloggers for the About Music Blog. The DoFollow and KeyWordLuv plug-ins are designed to provide a bit more incentive for quality comments by producing a do follow anchor text link back to the poster’s site or blog.

Check out the new blogs and tell me what you think.

I have copied my WordPress master folder to two of my domains today. I keep a copy of the WordPress blogging software on the server in the root directory and when I want to set up a new blog I copy it on the server instead of uploading the whole thing from my desktop. To copy a folder on the server only takes a couple of shakes of a lambs tail, much faster than uploading a major software package like WordPress.

I copy the folder to my destination directory and then make a few adjustments for the new blog. The config file has a few settings that need to be adjusted and my background images need to be properly named and uploaded. There are a couple of site specific include files that need to be changed and the WordPress set-up procedure to run. Then the blogs will be operational.

I will be back to post urls to the new blogs later.

I have been testing a couple of WordPress plug-ins over the past few days. It is easy to get excited by the lofty claims made for these plug-ins by their creators. It is a bit disappointing when they aren’t really quite ready for prime time. Both of the plugs that I am looking at fall under this classification in my opinion. While I can see uses for each they don’t quite perform as claimed.

The Deep Link Engine is a plug-in that searches the web for related blog posts and inserts links to these posts at the bottom of your post. The download page states that you can choose which links to post but in practice this is not possible. I think that this is due to attempting to make it work with an auto-content plug-in that the developers have just released today. The plug-in appears to carry out a final search when the publish button is clicked and inserts the links that it finds at that time.

There are two advantages that this plug-in does give. There will be some direct traffic from the linked sites, and if they like what they see there would be a possibility of a better one way link in a future post. The WordPress software by default pings linked blogs and those blogs produce a trackback to your post. If the linked post is good the readers there may find their way back to your site. In any case Google is likely to note the link and this may help your page SERP.

The second plug that I have just discovered is an auto-blogging software. I put one instance of the plug-in up last evening and was able (by jumping through several hoops) to get it working. I have only looked at a couple of the articles produced so far. One had very little text to the post and that appeared to be somebodies affiliate text link with the link stripped out. The other article at which I looked had a little more content. The formatting on the articles was not too good, but I may be able to tweak that in the css file. The software pulls images, but does not produce a margin around the image so the text runs right up to the image.

The plug-in, WP-Article-Fetch, serves the articles from a server maintained by the developers of the plug. They admit that the articles are scrapped from the web. They have an article spin software on the server. The one article with content was not very human readable. I suspect that this is a shortcoming of their spin engine, but there is a lot of content that is written by non native English speakers that does not read so well either. If it is the spin engine one would have to rewrite the articles if you want a site to be proud of, but there would be some possible value if the main objective is just to attract traffic to expose to your ads. In fact people may click on an ad just to get out of there and go somewhere that makes sense.

I will continue to test these software packages to see if there can be significant value to either of them. Being free they are now worth the money spent.

Somewhere in my travels I saw a reference to an open source software package called Dolphin7. This is a CMS based community building software package. It was designed as a platform for dating sites, but has features, according to the website, that rival the web 2.0 social networking sites. A package like this starts me thinking about possibilities. There were three areas that immediately came to mind.

I have downloaded the software and will begin to investigate those possibilities in the near future. I have been interested in hosting an article site so I will see if the software can be adapted to that end. Along with that goes my live sound wiki site. I tried some wiki software but the security (maybe my settings) left something to be desired. I checked it one day to find over 3000 spam comments on the home page alone. The other thought that I had is a shopping community site.

This may also prove to be a solution for my music site. I had found a file upload software and installed it on the site. This software seems to draw a lot of attention from a bad element via the search engines. When someone tried to upload a .php file last week I took the upload software offline. (A php file could probably be used to take control of my server space.)

Expect a further post on this software package when I have had opportunity to check it out. Being open source the code is available to modify as desired. This may lead to some new knowledge and be a bunch of fun.

Check out the software package and tell me your thoughts in a comment. If the software spawns ideas that you think would work but have no interest in pursuing let me know!