One important aspect of running a site is to know your visitors. If you know your users, you can find out what they’re looking for, and how they came to your site. You should check your logs regularly to track any changes in the behavior of the people who visit your site, and also to see which areas of the world they’re from. This can help in many ways.

For example, if you write about hockey and focus on Canadian hockey, you may find that most of the people come to your site by typing the word “hockey” in search engines, and that they’re from France. You can then start writing about hockey in France also, to cater to those people too if you wish and thus convert them into loyal readers.

One such tool for mapping out your users visually through their geographic location is gVisit. Gvisit [not owned by Google, by the way] uses Google Maps to plot a diagram of the last 10 people who visited your site, and which part of the world they probably came from. You can then zoom down to their probable exact location, down to their street map and name. The general information of their geographic location [such as their continent] will help you a lot in knowing what types of users your site is attracting.

The domain transfer and host switch took longer than we expected. There were a number of serious problems we had to deal with, but we’re happy to finally announce that we’re transfered over and that dS is sitting on a spanking new server.

We will launch our design and hosting services in the following weeks. Meanwhile we still have a lot of work to do until the rest of our domains are moved over.

Full blogging will resume shortly.

digitalSURGERY will be moving to its own dedicated server during the next few days. So there will be no updates until the move has completed, meanwhile you may notice some interruptions in our service. We anticipate a full and successful transfer within the next 48hrs or so.

Why are we moving servers?

The purpose of this move is so that we can provide our clients with feature rich hosting plans and web design services, that presently we are unable to offer. More details about our new hosting plans and design services after the initial move.

digitalSURGERY is expanding. Stay tuned for updates!

There has been reports flying around the Blogosphere that adding Chitika to your blog can in fact deduct from your AdSense earnings. The reason is simple. If people click on your Chitika ads then they won’t click on your AdSense ads. Chitika has more appeal at the first sight since it incorporates images in its ads. So most first time visitors would notice that more than your AdSense ads. Regular visitors, however would develop Chitika blindness over time, and this is when your AdSense earnings start to hike back up to its previous state.

A few bloggers don’t mind the AdSense dip so much. They claim that what they’re making with Chitika is far more generous than what they lose with AdSense. The balance they say is very well worth it.

However, in our very own experience, especially with a forum at http://soleredemption.com/forum/ we’ve noticed a 50% drop in AdSense earnings for the past week. More and more people are clicking on our Chitika ads. But the difference in loss is very substantial since Chitika isn’t giving us back what we lose, so we decided to take Chitika off that forum for the time being.

What are your experiences with Chitika? Please share with us in the comments below.

Users of WordPress who are considering signing up with Chitika’s eMiniMalls and existing eMiniMall clients may be interested in reading about the Chitika eMiniMalls Wordpress Plugin by X74.org:

The plugin is very straightforward. Put it in your wp-content/plugins directory, then go to your Plugins configuration page and click Activate. Once you activate the plugin, you will see a new button on your Quicktags toolbar. The new button is eMiniMall. Click it to insert the eMiniMall tag.

We haven’t got the plugin running on this site ourselves because our eMiniMall code was already in place before this review. But if you’ve got the plugin installed, or are about to give it a go and would like to give your feedback then use the comments link below.

The Uniform Server (aka UniServer or MiniServer) is a free opensource all-in-one fully powered webserver that comes with Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl as standard. Either use it for production or as a live server, perfect for both developers and webmasters alike. Portable enough to store on your USB keypen (20megs in total) and is easy enough to start, simply double click the start.bat file in the UniServer directory and you’re ready to go. (Note: To get the control panel displayed in the screenshot above, you will need to download and install the UniTray plugin from their site.)

The Uniform Server was first developed by Taras Slobodskyy as an application for his clients, but later on, moved to becoming this free and open source project. It’s the perfect system for both beginner webmasters and experienced developers, a fully powered webserver you can take with you on a USB Stick or even your camera’s flash drive. The perfect sales presentation tool. It’s the new world WAMP Package.

This wasn’t as easy to setup as XAMPP. However this does seem more stable than XAMPP and by that I mean I’ve tested it myself. So just remember to read the user manual, download the right plugins, follow the on-screen instructions carefully and you’ll be up and running within 10-20 minutes.

I got an email from one of our readers the other day. Tyler from Longren.org had this to say about Intouch:

I just quit using Intouch because it prevented Blogpulse (maybe others?) from crawling my site.

He might be right you know, because since installing the Intouch plugin here at digitalSURGERY we’ve also noticed the software over at BlogPulse and Google have both stopped crawling this blog. We are going to give it another 24 hours to see if the authors of Intouch get back to us with a fix (we contacted them yesterday), after this period we’ll have no choice but to remove the plugin and amend or delete the original article.

UPDATE: Google HAS indexed digitalSURGERY now and that’s with Intouch running. Maybe this is just a BlogPulse specific bug? We still have an unsolved mystery on our hands

UPDATE 2: I’ve concluded that this problem IS exclusive to BlogPulse at this moment. I disabled Intouch in my own blog and BlogPulse still hadn’t indexed my site almost 3 days later. However, other search engines (the ones that count) have been crawling my blog regularly.

We have recently upgraded our contact form with intouch. Until that moment I was totally oblivious of this technology called AJAX, short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML which isn’t really a technology of its own but a method of pulling in several existing technologies (Javascript, XML, XHTML, CSS, DOM, you name it) together to create better user interactivity. If this still sounds strange to you, don’t worry, I’m still having a hard time figuring it out myself. To give a more solid example, look at Gmail and Flickr. They use AJAX from the day I was born (well maybe not that long but they’re the first ones implementing it on the web). Anyway to cut a long summary short, this is the life purpose of AJAX:

Obviously, if we were designing the Web from scratch for applications, we wouldn’t make users wait around. Once an interface is loaded, why should the user interaction come to a halt every time the application needs something from the server? In fact, why should the user see the application go to the server at all?

Those are the wise words of Jesse James Garrett from adaptive path regarding our new friend AJAX.

Understand it? Maybe not. Why don’t you leave us a note and see what I’m talking about in real time. No page refreshing, no waiting. That is AJAX!

At the heart of Google’s Search Engine software is PageRank™, a system developed by Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for the purpose of organising and ranking individual web pages using Google’s vast link structure, which it then uses as an indicator for each individual page’s value (pages are ranked on scale of zero to ten).

As defined by Google:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Simply throwing your web site address up on every guestbook, comments page or internet forum you come across wont achieve anything. Remember, high quality sites receive a higher PageRank™. The more high quality sites you get linked on (and the more relevant your own content is), the higher your own PageRank™ will be.

While the subject of heatmaps are still hot around the blogosphere, I thought I’d mention it here too. This is to follow Lee’s post on AdSense Optimization Tips for your forum as Google has some tips for blogs and regular websites too. Here’s Google’s very own heatmap for effective AdSense placement. It’s been proven to work many many times, so throw your doubt in the back burners and start following the heatmap if you want to increase your CTR. I know, I know, we’re not very compliant when it comes to layout and design, but sooner or later we’ll learn to swallow our egos and settle with what works.

So next time your blog is ready for a redesign, keep the heatmap in mind. Happy blogging!