Google Is Stalking Me

Last week I was doing some research on buy vs. leasing a server/workstation.

Ultimately, I decided to buy one, this one.



I bought it because Amazon was just too expensive (for my purposes) and so was collocating a server (I wanted something a little more beefy than normal). I wasn't about to pay $1000 a month.

During that research, I made it to Storm website (on demand hosting). I'm not sure if I actually clicked on an advertisement on the result page of my Google search or what...but now they are everywhere.

I went to 4 sites today, and here's what I found:

wunderground.com



forum.xda-developers.com



somethingawful.com



linuxquestions.org



addictivetips.com



factmag.com



It's just a tad creepy, but I may be to blame for click on an advertisement (still unsure). Anyone out there experience something like this before?

Make Money Blogging

Yeah, it's pretty much a futile effort, but hey, I've been paid by Google.



Only 430 posts. I think that puts me at less than $0.40 a post. 28 months would come out to less than $4 a month.

Google Code

I've create a project on Google Code where I plan to start putting everything that I create, whether I blog about it or not.

http://code.google.com/p/oraclenerd/

I'm trying to figure out if I should do it project based or schema based...or application based? Don't really know.

I'll probably start with the Poor Man's Data Vault.

Google has some pretty cool stuff in their apps department there:
http://code.google.com/more/#products-products-android

I'd definitely like to check out the Chart API


http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World

How cool is that?

Also want to check out their Visualization API. A nice example can be found here.

So I strayed?

Has anyone else out there used Google Code?

Google Analytics

I've been using Google Analytics on this website since the beginning.

It's an absolutely amazing tool. It allows you to view statistics on site usage from so many different angles. The only thing required is inserting a few lines of javascript on your template (for blogger anyway), and stats are collected.

The dashboard (the main page) allows you to take multiple views of your data and drill down if necessary. It includes a drop-down to select the date range (flash I believe) and also to compare up to 2 metrics at once.



I spend an inordinate amount of time on the site. Any new visitors? How many so far today? What pages are being viewed?



Of course it's not perfect. I'm not sure, other than requiring all users to login, how you can determine the number of unique visitors.

Far and away my favorite view is the one that shows you the distribution by continent, sub continent region, country/territory, or city. Recently they added the ability to drill down as well.



It's definitely cool to see the different people from all over the world who have viewed the site.

Wait, how could I forget? The cost? Free!

Doesn't get any better than that.