Scheduled Posts

I have said it before and I will say it again – I love Scheduled Posts!!! I think it was the best thing Blogger introduced to its users and has enabled me to do so much with my blog. It is actually very likely that I would have stopped blogging by now if it wasn’t for this feature. My day-to-day life is too busy with work and night courses and entertainment that I think I would only post at best once a week without scheduled posts.
I spent several hours this long weekend getting the next two months worth of posts scheduled (features at least – the remaining posts are done more or less on the fly). I created a new feature to be introduced on the 24th of this month. I had been working on it for two weeks now but wanted a little emoticon graphic for at the end and finally got the time and motivation to sit down and create it (it’s not that impressive and wasn’t time consuming, I just enjoy procrastinating).
Now it is off to cross a few more items off my to do list…though I do have two more feature posts to write for September and October.

Chrome Ad

This ad appeared on the bottom of my blog the other day (where my largest AdSense is located) and I thought it was just beautiful. I am not allowed to click my ads, so I didn't even though I am interested in learning about Chrome. I don't think I would ever download it though as Firefox has been good to me and I have enough stuff installed on my computer that I never use. But you have to admit that the graphic image used in the ad is simply breathtaking.

List or Cloud

Today I was on Erin's Blog, Always a Mess, and saw that she had changed her label type from list to cloud. This has been a feature on other people's blog through other blogging sites (ie. not blogger) that I thought was neat. I had wanted it here, but it was not really an option. That is, I didn't think it was an option. Apparently Google Blogger has changed the capabilities of their labelling and though I learned they had upgraded it a little while ago, I didn't see they had added this.

The cloud label lists all your labels in alphabetical order still, it just makes it more of a graphic representation by enlarging the text of the most popular ones. I have changed it on my blogs and am going to spend the next little while seeing which I prefer - though I think I already know the answer.

A Cookie Monster Kind of Morning

This morning when I logged onto the computer and routinely opened up Google, I found a great big Cookie Monster greeting me. It is the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street and both yesterday and today Google has been celebrating it with special Google headers. Yesterday was Big Bird's legs as the L, and today, as you can see above, Cookie Monster is eating the cookie Google. I really love this one as Cookie Monster was my one of my favourite characters. My dad also did (and likely still does) a really good Cookie Monster impression.

The show premiered back in 1969 and as I am told by my parents today, was a children's show that parents could bear to watch. I remember watching many hours of this show growing up and often having my dad watching it alongside me. So seeing the Cookie Monster on my computer screen this morning filled me with a warm, happy memory that made my morning a little better.

Bounce Rate

Chris and I were going over Google Analytics the other day as she recently got the add-on going on her blog, and got thinking about Bounce Rates. She thought that it was the percentage of visitors who upon coming to the site, left in a certain amount of time realizing that it was not what they wanted at all. I had looked it up before, but had since forgotten what I had learned so I decided to look it up again this morning.
Bounce rate represents the percentage of initial visitors who bounce away to a different site rather than staying within the website (go to other pages within the same site). According to Wikipedia, there is a formula to calculate your bounce rate:
Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing One Page / Total Number of Visits
A visitor can bounce in a number of ways including; clicking on a link that sends them to another website, closing the window or tab, typing in a new URL, using the back button (to send them to a site other than your own) and/or session timeout (which is usually about 30 minutes).
According to Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik, "It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying". This statement may be true for actual websites, but in my opinion, when it comes to blogs and other informative sites, the percentages should be higher. I think blogs are much more of a daily read sort of site than one you would come to and go from post to post. The Wikipedia entry on Bounce Rate seemed to agree with me and stated that metrics such as returning visitors vs. new visitors might be more informative.
This being said, I am no longer going to care to much about my 70% Bounce Rate here on the Great Abyss, but rather focus on my 72:28 returning to new visitors ratio. I think it is a good ratio where most of my readers are returning (I must be doing something right) but I still have a decent percentage of new visitors coming in. This statistic is better used over time, where your returning would increase ever so slightly...right?

Top Content

Through the magic (and sometimes creepiness) of Google Analytics I have been able to determine the Top Content (most visited posts) on each of my blogs. I have put the lists on each blog somewhere near the links section. I hope that this enables readers to catch up on my most popular posts. I also find it kind of interesting and hope that they will change as we go along and I post about newer topics.

Scheduled Posts

Blogger has this amazing feature I like to call Schedule Posts. Well, it isn't really called that, it is just what it is. When writing posts for your blog(s) you can schedule them to post at any time. I love this feature because I often feel very creative and like writing several posts in one go. I think it would be a little annoying to come to this site, however, and find that I wrote 7 posts the day before. So I schedule them to appear over the next few days. It also helps in keeping my posts regular as now when I have time to write several posts, I can and then have them appear on the site on days that I know I will be too busy to write new posts or days when I am out of town and incapable of posting.
For example, I am currently on a beach on Lake Erie enjoying the sand and sun with my friends (and my camera) but I have been able to keep the posts coming as I sat down a few days before my departure and wrote as many posts as I could. I know, since it is the August long weekend, very few people will be visiting this site, but I still felt it necessary to have something here for those that did find a few minutes to come see me.

Google Analytics

I had signed up for Google Analytics quite some time ago and apparently never but the necessary code in my html for this (and my other) blog(s) - oops. So a couple days ago I finally realized this and put the code in the proper place. I can now track pretty much everything about my blogs: how many people come on the site, how long they tend to stay, which posts are being read, where the people are from etc. I won't be using it as I am sure some larger sites would, to collect data about their visitors and use it to their advantage, this is merely yet another way for me to amuse myself and even better - procrastinate from doing actual work while at work. I love gadgets that assist in slacking off at work.