PercentMobile: Enable mobile phone analytics to your website!

Every website uses services like Stat Counter, Google Analytics to tracks visitors & get detailed analytics about their visitors. But, these tracking systems are mainly concentrated at visits made from computers. Though it tracks visits from mobile devices, details are very less. With growing smart phone popularity, you can’t just ignore this space. I personally underestimated traffic which comes from mobile devices to Tech Bangalore, which I found 20% of overall traffic after enabling mobile analytics!

PercentMobile:

PercentMobile is a free mobile analytics service which gives granular details about visitors browsing your website from mobile devices. Details which PercentMobile gives you is just awesome, like, how many devices were wifi enabled, how many were touch screen, how many were smart phones, how many had QWERTY keyboard…etc. PecentMobile also lists all the devices which are used to browse your website.

I enabled PercentMobile for Tech Bangalore few days ago & above screenshot shows how much detail you can get from PercentMobile. Screenshot is partial, there’s more to look in analytics, like Network provider, region, most visited URLs, referrer…etc.

So, head over to PercentMobile & enable mobile analytics to your website!

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I made this presentation long back to present in a Blogcamp. But due to technical problems, I was unable to present it. So just thought of sharing it here. If you are in blogging from years, you might already know all the points mentioned in it!

Search Engines plays major role in getting traffic to blogs. Getting links from others is really important to make your Blog to list in higher places on search results. The more links you get from others, the more value search engines gives to your blog. But this is really tough to achieve. Easier way is to find good website/blog direcotories & submit your blog. Blog-Watch is one of the popular blog directories online with google PR5. Blog-Watch is created by Arun Vijayan (@mixdev) & maintained by myself & Arun.

Unlike other Blog Directories which simply take submissions, Blog-Watch has social features where others can rate & review your blog. One more really nice feature in Blog-Watch is each blog submission will get it’s own page! Like for Tech Bangalore I got http://www.blog-watch.com/blog1813.html.

Request to Bloggers:

Blog Directories will loose it’s PR if nobody links it. These directories must be community driven to keep & improve the PR of the directory. I request all bloggers to link back from their blogs & improve PR of directory. This is beneficial to all of us.

Link: www.blog-watch.com

Though I started photo blogging long back, not shared it with anyone. www.bangalorepix.com is the photo blog I started long back. Photos posted at Bangalore Pix are live pictures. I posts them from phone itself once I take them. I am using Flickr’s post to blog feature which creates unique email ID to post pictures. Sending pictures to that ID will not only posts it to Flickr, but also specified blog. I am also using twitterfeed to post tweets about the new photo entry to Twitter.

The Big Idea:

The big idea behind this photo blog will come into picture in long run. There are drastic changes happening in Bangalore due to Bangalore Metro & few road widening projects. As I keep posting pictures of different streets, popular places of Bangalore, in few years you can see how the place was looking before & now. And that’s keep continuing! I have taken this as my lifetime project & keep posting till my end! It will be a great experience to look back at old pictures taken years ago.

Right now I am using Nokia E66 to post the pictures, but picture quality is not so good since it has 3.2 MP camera. It will be great if somebody sponsors a good camera phone (Nokia? Sony Erricson? Samsung?)

Getting a hosting for my blog in my initial days where earnings were almost zero was a big challenge for me. I used credit card & payed it in installments! You need not to take that much risk now. Surpass Hosting is offering a good deal for this Valentine’s named “One Love”. Surpass hosting is offering it’s “Power” shared hosting plan for just $1 for the whole year. “Power” actually costs $4-$7 per month depending how many months you are paying in advance. “Power” plan includes 500 GB disc space, unmetered bandwidth, cPanel, 99.9% uptime & hosts upto 10 domains. This plan doesn’t include a domain, that’s too much to expect for 1 dollar! My friend Santosh bought the same offer last year & he is satisfied & refers all his friends to Surpass Hosting. He owns the blog www.harmlessgeek.com which has decent traffic of around 1.5k page views everyday.

This offer will be available from 14th Feb to 16th Feb. This is the right oppurtunity for starters to get a room for their blogs. More details to grab the offer here http://surpasshosting.com/one-love-2009.php

After a long time from it?s announcement, Google started to roll out Friend Connect. Today I got an ivitation from Google to enroll in for Friend Connect. Friend Connect is a service for website/blog owners to engage users. Friend Connect allows user to become member for a website & find if any of their friends are browsing same website. Visitors can use their Google Account to become member of a Friend Connect enabled site. Members can also invite their contacts & recommend a website. You can have a look at Friend Connect present at the top of Tech Bangalore. That’s the member widget which enables users to become member. Friend Connect also offers so many other widgets like Wall Gadget, Review/Rate widget & many more to engage users. These widgets also allows users to see reviews/posts from their contacts. Here is a few screenshots of member widget present on ControlEnter Sidebar.

How fast this post got loaded? Should be noticable improvement in speed! TB has seen improvements in traffic every month. My previous host was unable to handle this traffic even after implementing caching mechanism. In any shared hosting service there will be limitations on number of simultaneous PHP threads & CPU load. When a site exceeds these limitations it ends with an error message.

Tech Bangalore is now moved Media Temple (mt) which is grid based hosting service. Many of the world top blogs including Tech Chrunch are on Media Temple (mt). So, Tech Bangalore might never go down from now on & also loads faster

To encourage my regular & loyal visitors, I am introducing “Best Commentator Award” on my web blog. The award will be given to one best commentator every month. Award winner will receive a 2GB Pen Drive as prize from Tech Bangalore!!! Following are the guidelines to be followed for selecting a best commentator:

• Commentator will be selected depending on value of comment rather than number of comments he/she makes.
• Comments which are helpful to other people will be given preference, For Ex: you can try help other commentator’s questions.
• Come up with latest information which you might have & I don’t. For Ex: iPhone release date.
• Don’t give fake information in comments.
• Give appropriate working email ID while commenting, which helps me to contact you if you win the award.
• Contest applicable only within India

This award is effective from August 1st & comments made before that will not be considered. Best Commentator of a month will be announced on or before of 10th of next month. For Ex: Best Commentator for August will be announced on or before of September 10th. Just comment to win a 2GB pen drive!!!

DISCLAIMER:

Tech Bangalore reserves all rights to take this award back or do modifications in prize.

Have a look at this video!

Wow! excellent! Amazing!
That’s what came out of my mind when I used it for first time. It’s really a great experience while browsing media in Piclens. Yes, that’s Piclens which did the magic!

Piclens is a browser plugin which enables you to browse media like pictures, videos on a 3D wall, giving greate browsing experience. Piclens works great for popular sites like Youtube & Flickr. After installing Piclens, a one click launch button will be added to your browser. Upon clicking that button, Piclens launches a full screen 3D wall to browse the media on site. Click, hold, drag using mouse to navigate on the wall, click on a particular picture to zoom, or on a video to play!

To get Piclens go to www.piclens.com. It is available for Firfox on Windows/Mac/No Linux , Internet Explorer & Safari.

Enabling Piclens on your Blog/Website:

If you are a website owner or a blogger, you can enable Piclens on your site. This enables your visitors to experience & browse media on your site on a 3D wall. This will be especially useful for bloggers who post photographs (Photo Blog) & videos. If you use wordpress, it’s more easier, because they have WP plugin too!

You can get more details on enabling Piclens on your site at http://piclens.com/lite/

Update:
Piclens 1.7 has been released with following additional features:

• Shop Amazon– The 3D Wall transformed image search. Now PicLens launches online shopping into the 21st century. Browse and buy seamlessly just like window shopping!
• Discover– MSNBC, ESPN, movie trailers?Get the latest news, photos, and video feeds.
• Return to PicLens– An essential for playing with pictures: toggle in and out of your desktop, the browser, and PicLens!

Above is the radio created for Tech Bangalore. You can listen to all posts made on Tech Bangalore. Text to speech conversion looks pretty good. You can listen to all blogs which are having RSS feeds. You can listen to any blogs in simple two steps:

1. Goto http://blogbard.com
2. In the search box enter blog URL

That’s it! it automatically detects feed of that blog & creates a flash radio out of it. Embed HTML will be provided in a text box, copy & paste it in your blog. Now your visitors will be able to listen to your Radio, oh! I mean blog.

BlogBard also has features to read your subscriptions in Google Reader & Bloglines. Just login to thes services in BlogBard & it does the rest!