Feedjit

I was reading my friend Mike’s blog, The Top of Texas Gazette, the other day and he had found this very cool widget from Feedjit. Its a live traffic feed widget to add to your website, and though its not giving you as much information as a full fledged tracking tool such as Google Analytics, its really a great tool to see quickly where your traffic is coming from and it works very close to real time, well with each page refresh. Mike’s always having some really clever finds posted to his blog as well as a lot of humour, good music, great photo blog posts and even the serious posts as well, a little something for everyone there in the panhandle of Texas, so have a look sometime. Tell him G sent you

The widget is easily customised to incorporate it into your own site or blog. Its a handy tool to see at a quick glance where your traffic is coming from. As he mentioned in his post, he knows where his friends live so he can see at a glance who has dropped by and the same with me, If I see a hit from Lemesos, Cyprus, and I know fairly well thats my baby or one of her friends, and of course Amarillo, Texas is likely Mike. But generally the cities that show are I am guessing where the local traffic from the surrounding areas is routed to. For instance I know he doesnt live in Amarillo, just its the closest relay to him. (I dont know if relay is the correct term but I’m using it ! ) Its pretty neat and pretty accurate too. The only thing I can see is it only will show where you came from if you actually select a direct link form some site, just typing in the address wont show up, neither will it show where you left off to unless its a link on the site you are on. . Well its still a great tool I think and I was going to add it to our site on blogger, but my baby beat me to it! Oh she’s getting good now with this sort of thing Well I like to think I am teaching her some things , but I think she picks up things a lot better than she lets on It doesnt seem to add much time to loading a page either which is nice, as I already probably have just a few too many things there in the right column as it is increasing the load times and the overall consensus is already saying WordPress is a bit slow to begin with.

I mentioned above about it not showing actually the city you are living in but where the connection is made to the internet. In my case I live very near t the coast of northeastern North Carolina in a town called Grandy. the first time I saw the feed on Mike’s site it has me in Raleigh, NC and yesterday it was showing me in Kenly, NC and today its saying Lillington, NC. Well I have never even heard of either Kenly or Lillington!Well I had to look them up then to see where they were.

This pin on the far left is Lillington, the next one to it is Kenly and the one in the upper right is where I actually live so you can see its really not so accurate but only to a good size area. Not that it makes a difference really as you know generally when its someone you already know pretty well.  (I love this map feature in Live Writer by the way)

The biggest advantage it has is you can see at a glance when you have had some hits from say a search engine or another blog and what people are actually reading on your site.

Technorati Tags: Live Writer,widgets,web tools,friends,tech,garazon,feedjit

Polaroid Plugin for Live Writer

 

 

This is very cool picture plugin for Live Writer that turns an image into a Polaroid style pic with the ability to rotate it in either direction with incredible ease. Its available here for anyone using Live Writer to post to their blogs. So for an example I obviously have to use one of my favourite photos of my beautiful bride to be.

Hope she wont mind! Well she shouldn’t as its a great picture! I made this black and white from an original which was taken in Cyprus on our trip to the village in Omodos. You can see the original here. It was just outside the church there in the village square and the colours in the original were wonderful. I just felt this was one of those that makes an excellent greyscale pic too. You may notice the crossed fingers emoticon in this post which was added by another great little plugin that’s free the plugin gallery on Windows Live. It loads the same emoticons that are in use on Live Spaces, which I really am not a fan of, but I have to admit that I like the way MS has of late seemed to be playing a little nicer with its competition, but I guess its all about money in the end and they are realising now that end users have an incredible selection of software and social networking apps from which to choose. Amazing really to look and compare today to what is available to us now from even a couple of years ago. I can remember a time we had spent hours on MS sites and groups just getting a picture to show in a post, now those ‘red x’s’ are generally a thing of the past.  so far things have come, and so much more yet to come~ well like my Brit and I ! the good times haven’t even started!! see you soon my almost Americano! love you! XXX 

LiveWriter part 2

I was toying with Live Writer again this evening and I am actually very impressed with it and what it can do, now that I finally have it set to where it it works with my WordPress installation on my site. To be honest I have gotten to the point of being fed up with the bloat of most M$ stuff but I like this. And whats cool about it is I can also use it with my blogger sites as well! the only thing I was having trouble with was having to go back to the admin section on my site after posting to add the tags, but just looking around a little deeper in this program and found out I can actually do that from here too! it’s under “View>properties” the box comes up and I saw a space to enter keywords and I gave it a try and Voila! it added the keywords as tags! YEA!!! This old man is still learning crap! LOLNow if I can just figure out how to make the proprties dialog open automatically when the program opens I will be set! well now all I have to do is find where to put the code to show the tags with the post and I will be even happier!

I’m still sort of in shock this is a Microsoft program working and playing so well with others! You hear all the talk of the battle between Google and M$ and it seems LiveWriter has a leg up over google in that regard, wish it was working the other way around, I would dearly love for Picasa to be able to make a blog post to a site other than blogger, or do they and I have missed it?! Well it wouldnt surprise me if I did miss it, this old brain of mine is most always in lala land with my beautiful Alison Michelle! xxxxx love ya baby!