CodeProfessor

5 Types of Tag Clouds May 2, 2006

Markus wrote a post over at Performancing about tag clouds and started an interesting discussion. Yours truly added a few comments. At first glance, it may seem that a tag cloud is a tag cloud is a tag cloud, but there are several distinct differences, as far as the source information used to build the clouds is concerned. I’m summarizing here my conclusion about tag clouds, based on the discussion that Markus started.

Types of tag clouds:

Category-based, using the category names that you have defined on your blog platforms.

Content-based, using the full text of all your posts to build …

Another Way Track Googlebot Visits To Your Blog March 23, 2006

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I’ve written a couple of times about how to track GoogleBot visits to your websites/ weblogs. Here’s another way, which also tracks your participation at other websites, provided you are using your full name.

What I do is use Google Alerts to track several topics. Each day, I get an email report for each topic. Each report has one or more website/ weblog article excerpts, complete with links. (It’d be nice if this service was available in RSS form, but it isn’t.)

Now, yesterday, for fun, I decided to track my own name using Google Alerts. I’m fortunate in the …

How to Track Googlebot Visits March 4, 2006

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Many bloggers want to track when the Googlebot visits their weblog, for various reasons. One way is to use Google Sitemaps, to see which of your pages Google has index, as well a relative measure of pagerank for those pages. However, this does not tell you when the Googlebot visited.

If you want a more accurate accounting on Googlebot’s visits, one way is to check your web server logs. These logs tell you not just when Googlebot visited, but other bots as well - provided you know how to decipher all of the different “user agents”. But if your host …