Number one in google!

Its a great day for Candyjar! Back to number one in google for 'candyjar' beating Channel 4. But for the first time ever, out of the millions of Wards in the world, and more specifically the 21,500,000 Wards with a web presence, I am in the top 50! For Dave Ward, I am in the top Twenty. Looks like the tips and tricks listed here over the past few days work! The more specific phases all come up number one. 'Dave Ward Belfast' ranks 1, but 'Dave Ward Edinburgh' ranks 5th, because of the university graduates listed and the vast amount of comedians and actors listed for the Edinburgh Festival over the years. (update 09/02/07 - 'dave ward edinburgh' and 'david ward edinburgh' i now have 3 places in the top 5) As an experiment in teaching myself google and listings this isnt bad. Especially considering this is purely natural listing, no paid for keywords and listings. Neh bad sham!

Social Bookmarking

Maxpower has a great list of social bookmarking sites. Im not sold on this yet. A good way to get your site up the google rankings or simply a fad? Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags. Social Bookmarking at MaxPower

Reinventing HTML

Tim Berners Lee has a post on his blog this morning about re-inventing HTML. I get the feeling this is a stepping stone to the semantic web dream of Berners Lee The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML, as also in parallel xHTML. It will have a different chair and staff contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML together. We have strong support for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser makers. Reinventing HTML

Google Analytics

Google are not a friends of mine recently. All the other search engines have re-spidered candyjar and have it in the top three for the term 'candyjar'. But Google instead got confused and spidered the RSS feed. Im confused in turn by that one, but in an attempt to see whats going on and to find out what all the fuss is about I have installed Google Analytics, I will give you an update once its done its magic in a few days.

What is Google Analytics: Google's very detailed stats & adwords package (although they bought and tweaked Urchin's product to create this). The information it provides is super-rich without being unwieldy You can use it to track simple traffic statistics, but you can also you use it (and here's the real power) to track conversions and associated behavior. It integrates closely with your AdWords campaigns but can also track any marketing initiative you run, Google-based or not. If you do commerce online, you're insane not to be using this to measure. It has great visual representations of your information, making it easily digestible. This includes graphs, charts, and a very nifty site-overlay showing you where and how people click through your site on their way to conversion Also, Geo-targeting map representations, date-range comparisons, etc. Visit Google Analytics

eNewsletters

Ive had a few problems recently with eNewsletters. Getting the many email program's and web based versions to show emails correctly is a real pain. That is if you can get them past spam servers! Then if im sending out a large email list it makes sense to be able to tie the whole thing in with a really powerful stats system.. I will keep you updated with what I find, but heres one I found today:

MailUp is a web based tool for managing email newsletters. It can be integrated with web sites or CRM applications. It manages subscribes (single or double opt-in), unsubscribes, bounces and provides statistics. Newsletter Sender by MailUp

FAMFAMFAM- Gone?

Went to FAMFAMFAM today get some icons for a new shopping site and was surprised to find it down. Hope everything is ok over in Famland.

Another great icon list can be found here at Bullet Madness

Get back up and running Fam!

Lightbox Gone Wild Demo

This demo illustrates a few of the possibilities of available to a developer using Particletree's Lightbox Gone Wild Script. lightbox can be used to provide additional info instead of just images, you can still show an image or present a form for user input. Lightbox Gone Wild Demo

Vanilla - Discussion Board

Excellent discussion board code & Free too! Vanilla Tour & Download

Lightbox & Wordpress

When I was making up my portfolio I would have given my right arm for this. Lightbox JS and Wordpress, nicely integrated. Now if only I can find the time to integrate it! Get the files Example of Lightbox 

37 Signals

As im on a bit of a usability burst today. 37 Signals. Fluffy Overview from apple One of their products 'backpack' The site Must get round to buying this book. Getting Real, the book by 37signals