Mercurial Queue - manual rebase for older version of Mercurial

The Mercurial on the server is version 1.0.1. It does not have the rebase extension installed. Thank goodness, I found this post that explains how to manually rebase the repository.

http://blogs.sun.com/ace/entry/mq_mercurial_queues

This is the clearest walk through that I have come across so far. Better than the one on Mercurial's website.

Enjoy!

Thesis Quick Skin

This is not a hack but a quick way to dress up Word Press/Thesis with different looks.

Download the skin manager from thesisthemes.com and a free skin.

Upload the files into the "custom" folder in Thesis Theme. You can now create many, many different looks by duplicating the "skin" folder and tweak each one of them to you heart's content. Simple and clean.

I like it.

Thesis Hack #1

Playing with Wordpress Thesis Theme lately. Chris is smart. He  rewired the Wordpress HTML creation process that gears towards SEO and Webpage creation. It groups a webpage into layout blocks that you can easily replace the content or add content to it.

I was messing with the div#header section today and could not get it the way I wanted.  Examining the code and found that there is NO hook for "title and tag line". I need to replace the H1 tag on the tag line for SEO purpose. You can unhook the default header with "thesis_hook_header" but you will lost the ability to use the "thesis_hook_before_title" and "thesis_hook_after_title".

I asked myself, why not add a "thesis_hook_title_and_tag" hook?

You only need to change two files. 

Step One - Replace "thesis_title_and_tag( )" in header.php with "thesis_hook_title_and_tag( )".

Step Two - Add the hook "thesis_hook_title_and_tag" to hook.php. Just open that file and you will know what to do.

That's it! You have a new hook "thesis_hook_title_and_tag" to be used in custom_function.php.

Website Annotation!

While working on a new section of a website, I come across the problem of how can the owner, my supervisor, SEO team,  and Copy writing team review the website at the same time. First, I do not want to sort throught a collection suggestion written on pieces of paper or emails that land on my lap at random times. Second, some of the suggestions may have conflict of interest that need to be resolved. They need to know what the others are suggesting.

I have been using Firefox Scrapebook plugin for a while. I use it to capture webpages that are interesting and add my notes to them. So I think there must be some applications that allow users to review a website and offer feedback. Using Google finally found a blog lead that reviewed an application called "Notable".

Notable is awesome (www.notableapp.com). Not only for design review but for SEO and Copywriting which are very important to the company's business. I also found "Denote"(www.denoteapp.com) but it is gear towards website design review instead of SEO purpose.

I sign up for a free account with Notable,  added my supervisor and SEO team to the user list and uploaded a screenshot of a webpage for them to test it out. Will see how that goes.

Bing Yahoo Integration

Attended a Webinar about the Bing Yahoo Integration. As I understand it, the deal means Yahoo will not be powering the Search in the next 10 years. Microsoft will be the power house for Bing and Yahoo. Microsoft will incorporate Yahoo Search technology into the Bing Search Engine. Yahoo basically gave up their own Search Engine and handed it to Microsoft.

A few of interesting points from the Webinar.
1. Microsoft delivers search results to both Bing and Yahoo. Page ranking stays the same on Bing and Yahoo BUT the presentation of the SERP will be different. Yahoo will apply their own mix-in to serve the results.

2. The report in AdCenter will not show the traffic split between Bing and Yahoo. The panel suggested analyzing server log to get that information.

3. There will be no option to choose to show the ad in Bing or Yahoo.

I am my boss

I was trying to teach my 3 years old son that it would be wise for him to follow daddy and mommy's instructions.
I told him that Daddy and Mommy are his boss. He came back with "I am my boss!"

I thought "Wow, you will experience lot of pain down the road if you continue to see it that way."

Use More Than 5 Custom Variables in Google Analytic Tracking Script

Ophir Prusak's blog Analytics Impact shared how to set up the tracking script to allow more than 5 custom variables. I can think of a dozen of data points that I wanted to log and could not because of the limit mentioned in the help document. Here is the link to his blog.

Analytics Impact - Get more than 5 custom variables in Google Analytics

Search ranking in Google Analytics

The filter that logs the value of the ranking variable(cd) in the Google organic search works.

1. track the ranking movement of keywords daily or weekly or monthly
2. provides insight for long tail keywords that rank high in search results

Need to find a way to automate this process instead of exporting the list every day or every week.
I can see there is a lot of potential in this.

First Touch Keyword

Got referred to a blog about keyword attribution and it has a script to collect first touch keyword in GA.

Finally got that working in GA today. Custom variables only allows 64 characters. Because the values are url encoded, blank spaces are turn into 3 characters (%20).

I thought what a waste of valuable characters. So I tweaked the code and replace %20 with an underscore. This makes the custom keyword readable in GA and allows more useful characters to be logged in GA.

Read my tweak to the script here

Mystery of zero visits in Google Analytics solved

Keywords report has some keywords with zero visits! Is this a mistake?

After Googling around and found the answer in varies blogs. If the visitor did a second/third/fourth/...etc. search within 30 minutes and arrived at our website again, the second/third/fourth/...etc. search keywords will be logged but the visits count will go towards the first keywords.

Here are some of the blogs that covers this issue.

http://www.yoursearchadvisor.com/blog/google-analytics-keywords-with-zero-visits/

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=0d04370f123bc16c&hl=en

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/advanced-google-analytics

Live optimization

Watching Live Optimization from Marketing Experiment. It has a lot of nuggets in how to tweak web pages to rank higher in searches. Some quick points:

1. For establish websites, put the brand last in the page
2. domain name that has keywords 
3. keywords in url path
4. listed in directories like Yahoo!directory
5. content development

Some of the things I have read bits and pieces from blogs but have not seen how it is done. This webinar provided me a concrete examples of what should be done for SEO. Highly recommended for someone trying to get their heads around SEO.

How to improve your SEO clicks and conversions

Will start applying some of the thing I picked up to discount dental plan

Keywords Page Ranking in Google Analytics

Looking for a way to match organic keywords with page ranking and conversion. Found a blog from last year that extract the page ranking from the referral url (http://yoast.com/track-seo-rankings-google-analytics/). Just implemented it yesterday. Already seeing results in Google Analytics. Not ideal but better than no data at all.
There are some surprises. Will see how this goes after a week or two.

Django Pinax 1

Started looking into Django Pinax a couple of weeks ago. The set up was easy and the example sites ran well. Seemed a decent package for a quick turn around job. After messing around with it a bit, I am not sure that Pinax is ready for quick turn around projects. Just as other people pointed out, trying to customize the  sample projects are not easy because of the dependencies. I wished I found those 2 blog posts before digging into it ( here http://www.rhonabwy.com/wp/2010/02/27/the-darker-side-of-pinax/ and http://fitzgeraldsteele.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/newbies-experience-setting-up-a-pinax-site/). I am looking forward to version 0.9 or even 1.0 to come out.

Now I need to start from the basic project and integrate the parts one by one into the application folder.