Museum Search: Recommendations

June 5, 2010
Museum Search: Recommendations

About four weeks ago, I played around with a huge log of people’s search data from a museum/gallery/collections website. Lots of interesting little findings ‘fell out’ of the analysis, that I thought I’d quickly share with you: Museum search boxes should be at least 20 characters wide. It’s diminishing returns after that. Museum searches...
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What #1 on Hacker News Does For Your Stats

May 31, 2010
What #1 on Hacker News Does For Your Stats

The Januarist isn’t the most popular blog in the world, but thanks to lots of good content and some great incoming links (e.g. from Wikipedia and Boing Boing), it usually attracts about 100 visits a day (mostly through search engine referrals). Yesterday (well, on 31 May 2010), a new post called “Why Are the...
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A Google Analytics Dashboard to Check Today’s Referrers for Multiple Websites

May 30, 2010
A Google Analytics Dashboard to Check Today’s Referrers for Multiple Websites

I spend a LOT of time on Google Analytics (GA), especially since increasing the number of blogs that I regularly write content for (Contentini, The Januarist, Amorphous Blog, Lame But Cool, this one…). For me, the most valuable part of GA is keeping an almost real-time check on where traffic is coming from /...
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When Do Bands Decide They Don’t Want To Be Sampled?

May 26, 2010
When Do Bands Decide They Don’t Want To Be Sampled?

Just something I’ve been thinking about lately. Most bands, early in their career, would benefit from being sampled by a reputable artist (say, Girl Talk). If you were in a new band, and Girl Talk sampled you, you’d be pretty happy, right? When does this emotion change, from happiness (gaining attention) to anger (having...
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Tumblr, SEO, and Why I Moved To WordPress

May 23, 2010
Tumblr, SEO, and Why I Moved To WordPress

A number of people have asked about, or questioned my SEO-influenced move from Tumblr to (self hosted) WordPress for this blog. A lot of people know a little about SEO, which has caused a number of, “It’s not Tumblr, you just haven’t configured it; just edit the template” style responses, which I’ve seen repeated...
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