Category Archives: Podcast Episodes

The Maria Speaks podcast. Tune in for audio blog entries, how-to information, and other audio content. You’ll find transcripts of many episodes here, too.

Podcast Stuff

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Maria Speaks Episode 31: Podcast Stuff.

This episode marks my return to Maria Speaks after a two-month break. It covers my change in podcasting technique, a new video podcast I just created for Flying M Air, and the podcasts I subscribe to.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Maria Langer. Welcome to Episode 31 of Maria Speaks: Podcast Stuff.

I just spent the past three hours redoing the Maria Speaks podcast. I used to publish it with Blogger and FeedBurner. Now, since my personal Web site is blog-based using WordPress, I cut Blogger out of the picture. It took me three hours to create or modify blog entries to embed my thirty existing podcast entries on this site. Well, twenty-nine. One of them covered an eBook I no longer distribute, so it didn’t link to it.

I developed this new method of podcasting — new to me, I should say — to reduce the amount of work required to publish a podcast and keep all podcast information together. I used to use a WordPress plugin called podPress, but I removed all references to it and disabled it today. Keep it simple — that’s what I decided. And the technique I worked out is relatively simple, utilizing an existing WordPress blog and FeedBurner. I wrote about it in an article to be published soon by Informit.com. When it comes out, I’ll link to it on the Aritcles page of my Web site and create a podcast based on its content.

For some reason, my “Maria Speaks” podcast has more subscribers than ever. That makes me wonder, since I haven’t released a podcast episode since September, and that episode was a bit more commercial than I like. This time last year, I was releasing one or two episodes per week. I ran out of steam last December and have been releasing them far less frequently. Still, my subscriber numbers have been climbing steadily. It doesn’t make sense to me, but it did convince me to release more content. The way I see it, when all these new subscribers start getting the new content, they’ll either like it and stick around or not like it and leave.

In the meantime, I started a new video podcast in October for my helicopter charter company, Flying M Air. I have literally thousands of photographs taken throughout the southwest, in places I fly to. I also have photos taken by my husband and by professional photographer and Bigfoot Hunter, Richard Noll.

Rick accompanied me on a test run of Flying M Air’s Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure. The deal we struck was that in return for all all-expense paid trip, he’d let me share copyright on all the video and still images he took. While he has the ability to sell these images as stock photos or use them in other projects, I have the ability to use them in marketing material to help sell the excursions and in articles I plan to write for publication about the trip. It was a win-win deal. Richard took lots of pictures from the air, which is something I simply can’t do while I’m flying. He also took video images with something a few clicks better than the little Canon digital video cameras I have. I’m still going through the over 1,000 still images and 3 to 4 hours of video he left on my MacBook Pro’s hard disk before departing back to the Seattle area.

I decided to turn my library of photos into video brochures for Flying M Air’s tours, charters, and excursions. The result is “Come Fly With Us!” (subscribe), which currently has three episodes. Another episode will be released Monday. (That’s one of the good things about my new podcast publishing technique; I can schedule a publication date and time. This makes it possible to record several podcast episodes at once and release them periodically over time.)

Part of the learning experience for creating this new podcast was finding legal music to play while the images were showing. I wasted a lot of time looking. Some sites promoting “royalty-free” music for podcasts required that you buy the songs to use them. That wouldn’t have been so bad if the songs were sold at iTunes prices or even a few bucks, but they were asking for $25 or $39 dollars per song. I use each song on just one video podcast episode and plan to release new titles once a week until I run out of material. That music was simply over my budget.

The much hyped GarageBand.com promised royalty-free, free downloads music. But the vast majority of artists didn’t allow free downloads of their songs. And since I was looking for relatively mellow instrumentals — you know, mood music — I had trouble finding what I wanted there in the first place.

I finally wound up on MagnaTune.com. I heard about it during an interview with the site’s founder, John Buckman, that Miraz had referred me to. MagnaTune predates iTunes by about two weeks. Although it has a limited number of artists on board, it offers very reasonable licensing of its music for podcast use. I’ve been getting tunes for my “Come Fly with Us!” podcasts from MagnaTunes since then and giving credit to the artists at the end of each video. I hope they sell some music.

Speaking of music, if you’ve been listening to Maria Speaks for a while now, you may have noticed that I changed the “theme song” for this podcast. The reason: I had a one-year licensing agreement with FreePlay Music for the old tune, Floater. Last year, when I bought that license, it cost $25/year, which I thought was reasonable. When I went to renew, the price had gone up to $100/year. I guess they decided to cash in when podcasting took off. That’s above my budget for a free podcast that doesn’t even earn any advertising revenue, so I decided to find a new tune. The new tune is is a segment from a nameless bit that I got off a public domain music CD I acquired back in 1996. I spent about an hour yesterday going through the one thousand plus songs on that CD set to pick this one. I’m not sure how much I really like it, but I do need something for my opening and closing credits.

The main topic of this podcast episode was supposed to be a quick discussion of some of the podcasts I listen to regularly. So let me dive into that for a few minutes.

I want to start off by telling you what I don’t listen to. I don’t like podcasts that mix discussion and “Garage Band” music. For example, I used to listen to a podcast about words hosted by two guys who seemed to guess more about word origins than actually research them. They’d pick few words or phrases and do a 40-minute podcast about them. The way they’d stretch out that podcast is by inserting a few Garage Band songs into it. Trouble was, their taste in music was nothing like mine, so I found myself having to fast forward through the music filler to get to the discussion meat. Fast forwarding is not always easy when you’re listening on an iPod and driving in traffic. When I realized that the content I was interested in wasn’t that good to begin with, I dropped the podcast. Ditto for the writing podcast some woman was doing. I wasn’t listening to hear music. I was listening to hear content. If the content was music related, the music would make sense. But it wasn’t and it didn’t.

In general, I don’t listen to music podcasts at all. Finding new music is low on my priority list. So if you you think you might find some tips for new and exciting music podcasts here, you will be disappointed.

What I do like listening to is podcasts that can enlighten me, teach me new things, or make me laugh with intelligent humor. I listen to podcasts primarily when I’m driving or flying, although I do have a i-Fusion speaker thing that makes it easy to listen when I’m working in the kitchen, making dinner or tidying up. So if I can be trapped in a place doing a relatively mindless thing and listen to something that’ll expand my horizons or make me laugh, I’m pretty happy.

That said, here’s a brief summary of some of the podcasts I listen to. You can find links to these podcasts on the transcript for this podcast. Go to www.aneclecticmind.com and click the Podcast link in the navigation bar to find it.

First on the list are a handful National Public Radio (or NPR) podcasts. There are 355 of these podcasts and I’ve tried at least 20 of them. I listen to five of them regularly.

  • NPR: Story of the Day is a daily selection of a story from NPR’s programming. These stories are wide-ranging in topics: business, war, travel, entertainment — you name it.
  • NPR: Business Story of the Day is a daily selection of a business story from NPR’s programming. Stories cover anything business related, from Silicon Valley news bits to global oil production information and lots of stuff in between. It keeps me informed about the business world.
  • NPR: Satire from the Unger Report is a weekly podcast of satire by Brian Unger. It’ll make you laugh — and think.
  • NPR: Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! is a weekly radio quiz show about the news. It has a panel of three celebrities (no, not the kind in People magazine) and call-in contestants. The questions and answers lean toward the comical, so the show is extremely entertaining.
  • NPR: Sunday Puzzle is a weekly podcast of word games with an NPR host, Will Shortz (of the New York Times), and a telephone contestant.

I’ve tried other NPR podcasts, but eventually lost interest in them. And as I prepared this list, I noticed a bunch of new ones to try out. So I might report on some additional podcasts from NPR in the future.

I also listen to American Public Media (APM) Future Tense. It’s a great podcast with short episodes about technology topics.

I listen to three PBS podcasts:

  • American Experience is a podcast with short episodes about historical topics. Recent episodes included the Gold Rush and New York.
  • NOVA is a podcast of brief stories from the NOVA science television show.
  • NOW is a podcast of rather lengthy stories form the NOW news television show. Sometimes the stories interest me and I listen to them. Other times, the stories don’t interest me and I just delete them.

I also watch a NOVA video podcast, which I find excellent. It combines science information with video and still images in a 2 to 3 minute podcast. I like some episodes so much that I save them as movies on my iPod so I can show them to others.

Speaking of video podcasts, I also subscribe to a number of others:

  • GARY-PAUL TV is a video podcast of weird stuff published by Gary-Paul Prince of Peachpit Press. My favorite episode, which I’ve saved as a movie for future viewing, is “Drinking and Driving Texas Style.”
  • Comedy Central: Stand-Up is a video podcast of stand up comedy segments. I only like about half of these, but the ones I like arae really good, so I keep checking in.
  • National Geographic Video Shorts are short video segments from National Geographic television shows.

I also used to enjoy a video podcast called CockpitCast, which showed video out the front window of various commuter jets as they landed at airports in western U.S. cities, but there hasn’t been a new release in a long time, so I don’t know if the pilots are still doing it.

Another aviation podcast I enjoy is Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase. Betty is a flight attendant who loves to travel. She brings along her tape recorded and gets stories from other flight attendants, pilots, and people at the places she flies to. The stories are great but the audio quality is pretty bad sometimes. Still, I think it’s worth a listen. My favorite story? The one where a passenger who died of natural causes during a flight was not declared dead until after the flight was more than halfway to its destination.

For tech news and info, I’ve been trying two Wired magazine podcasts:

  • Wired Magazine is a podcast of short pieces from Wired magazine columns.
  • Wired News is a podcast of short news stories from Wired magazine.

I also subscribe to Slate magazine‘s Daily podcast, which includes interviews about Slate’s online pieces as well as audio versions of some of Slate’s online pieces. It gives me a chance to “read” Slate without having to visit the site. Of course, I only get a small portion of the thoughtful gems available online. I used to subscribe to Slate’s Explainer podcast, but have given it up because the topics weren’t all that interesting to me. You might like them, though, so check them and out see for yourself.

I subscribe to the WordPress podcast because of my interest in WordPress software. I admit that I’ve downloaded all episodes and have listened to just three of them. I think the podcast is good, but I have to be in the right frame of mind to listen to them.

The same goes for the Podcasting Underground podcast. Good, informative stuff, but I have to be in the mood to listen to information about podcasting.

For politics, I listen to a pair of real left-wingers. Sorry, but I am not a conservative at all, neo or otherwise.

  • Real Time with Bill Maher is an hour-long podcast of Maher’s HBO television series. He does an interview and then discusses one or more current political topics with a panel of three that usually includes one celebrity entertainer and one political figure. His panels always include someone sitting on the right, so both sides are represented. While I don’t agree with everything I hear, I like to hear the various viewpoints on current political topics. New Rules is a much shorter podcast that includes just the New Rules he lists at the end of his show.
  • MSNBC Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a collection of Olbermann segments from his MSNBC Countdown television show. Olbermann is a Bush basher — do doubt about it — and it amazes me that he says some of the things he says. It’s a real example of the First Amendment in action — if Olbermann said these kinds of things just once in a place like North Korea or Iran or Iraq under Saddam Hussein, he would have been shot dead for treason. But in our country, we’re allowed to voice all kinds of opinions. Olbermann’s aren’t the kind that’ll ever get on Fox News. My favorite bit? The count of times our president said “Stay the course” after Tony Snow told the press he’d only said it eight times. Classic reporting.

I also started listening to Penn Jillette’s weekday radio show on FreeFM, PennRadio. Penn Jillette is the big, fast-talking guy from the magic duo of Penn and Teller. An atheist (his Nevada license plate is the word “ATHEIST”) and libertarian, he definitely has some non-standard views of politics. But he also covers non-political topics. I don’t enjoy all of Penn’s podcast episodes — I probably delete about half of them without listening to more than a few minutes — but I like enough of them to keep my subscription. One of my favorite episodes was his interview of Phyllis Diller (who I didn’t even know was still alive). Ms. Diller had some fascinating stories to tell and I was especially touched by Penn’s patience when her memory failed her more than once during the interview.

And finally, one of the first podcasts I ever subscribed to, podictionary. This daily podcast, with 2 to 5 minute episodes, discusses the origin of a word or phrase. A weekly digest version is also available. Many, many thanks to Charles Hodgson for his dedication to the subject of word history.

Now you know what I’m listening to. What are you listening to? Share your comments and suggestions with me and other listeners by posting your comments on the transcript for this episode. Go to www.aneclecticmind.com, click the Podcasts link in the navigation bar, and scroll down until you find the “Episode 31: Podcast Stuff” entry. Or just use the Search box to search for the number 31. Then use the Comments link at the bottom of the entry to read other people’s comments and add your own.

And as always, thanks for listening. More later.

Mac Cowboys

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Maria Speaks Episode 30: Mac Cowboys.

Join me and a bunch of other Mac geeks for a dude ranch mini-vacation.

Transcript:

Welcome to WickenburgA few months ago, I started thinking about how cool it would be to have a computer conference here in Wickenburg, at my favorite guest ranch: Rancho de los Caballeros. Los Caballeros is not only the nicest dude ranch in this Dude Ranch Capital of Arizona, but it has the most interesting activities and the absolute best restaurant.

The idea was to invite a bunch of authors and let each of them do three or four sessions over a five-day period. The sessions would be in the morning and there would be all kinds of activities in the afternoon, like horseback riding, golf, shopping trips into town, Jeep tours, and, of course, helicopter rides. The people who came would have a lot of fun, learn a lot, and have a great opportunity to network with other Mac users. For some people, it could even be considered a business trip. Best of all, I could introduce people to Wickenburg, the little town I live in and often blog about.

The event would be called Mac Cowboys because of the western dude ranch theme.

Now in case you don’t know, I’m a busy person. It took me nearly forever to talk to the ranch people and crunch the numbers to see what the trip would cost. It looked feasible, so I set a date in early December, before the busy Christmas holidays. Then I got a list of possible author/speakers from one of my editors at Peachpit and invited them to attend.

I guess everyone is just as busy as I am. None of them could attend. I hope that it’s nothing I should be taking personally.

Desert SceneSo rather than give up the whole thing, I decided to restructure the event. I shortened it from five days to four. I cut the speakers from five to one. I cut the sessions from 12 to just two and made them more discussion based, giving all the participants a chance to share what they knew and ask everyone questions. I arranged the activities so all participants could go together, giving everyone an opportunity to network like crazy outside the meeting rooms. Then, with greatly reduced costs, I recalculated the per-person cost. The numbers I came up with were certainly within reason for a 4-day, all inclusive weekend at a luxury dude ranch.

Now I’m taking it public, offering it to the readers of my blog, podcast listeners, and the folks who buy Mac books from Peachpit Press.

Please understand that this isn’t a typical computer conference.

For a moment, think of the last computer conference you attended. You know, the one in the big conference hall with thousands of attendees shuffling around a show floor with shopping bags. The one with overcrowded dark classrooms with bad sound systems and speakers telling you more about whatever it is they’re trying to sell than something you really want to learn about. The one where you paid to get into the conference hall, you paid to sit through seminars, you paid to stay in a hotel, and you paid to eat disappointing meals. The one with uncomfortable free shuttles or long walks from your hotel to the conference hall. The one where your only entertainment were demos on the show floor or sad vendor parties with bad food and expensive alcohol.

Now wipe those ugly thoughts right from your mind.

Wickenburg SunsetMac Cowboys is a mini-vacation first: a four-day, three-night stay with luxury accommodations at a ranch that can only accommodate about a hundred and fifty people at once. You get yourself to Phoenix Sky Harbor airport or Wickenburg and just about everything else is paid for — ground transportation to and from the ranch, hotel room, three meals a day, horseback riding, golf, Jeep tour, helicopter tour, swimming, tennis, nature hikes — all kinds of activities. There’s even free wi-fi access in certain hotspots throughout the ranch. All you pay for is alcoholic beverages and extras like skeet shooting or golf cart or club rental.

I’ve set aside three short hours a day on the two middle days for official business stuff: a pair of conference sessions where you can learn more about using your Mac. One session covers Mac OS X topics. The other covers Web publishing topics. And there will be plenty of informal sessions among participants to pick brains and get burning questions answered.

And if you’re wondering what December is like in Wickenburg, AZ, imagine 60° to 70° F sunny days — often without a cloud in the sky. Weather won’t keep you inside during the day. Sure, at night it gets cold, but it also gets dark. And you have to rest sometime.

Sound good? I think so — and I do this stuff all the time.

This first Mac Cowboys event, which is scheduled for December 7th through 10th, 2006, is a test of my idea. If it works out on this small scale, it should work out on a larger scale with more speakers and more guests. If it ever outgrows Los Cab or I feel like trying someplace new, I can take it on the road to another ranch. I’d like to do it once or twice a year, just to keep life interesting.

So consider this your formal invitation. Come on out to Wickenburg and be a Mac Cowboy for a few days.

Want more information? Check out the Mac Cowboys Web site at maccowboys.com.

A Commercial

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Maria Speaks Episode 29: A Commercial.

This is my first attempt to create a podcast with GarageBand. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

It’€™s a ‘€œcommercial’€ for Flying M Air’s Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure. Short, with lots of pictures. A decent example of how a podcast can be created with Garageband on a Mac.

This is my first attempt to create a podcast with GarageBand. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

It’s a “commercial” for Flying M Air’s Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure. Short, with lots of pictures. A decent example of how a podcast can be created with Garageband on a Mac.

A transcript can be found on the Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure page of Flying M Air’s Web site.

Use the Comments link here to enter your comments about this podcast.

I’ll probably whip up a how-to article that explains how I did this. Apple’s documentation is pretty crummy. (I guess that’s why I can make a living writing books about Apple software.)

Site Stats and Why They’re Important

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Maria Speaks Episode 28: Site Stats and Why They’re Important.

In this episode I discuss a few stats software programs for Webmasters and bloggers. Then I tell you a little bit about some of the stats on one of my sites and why the stat is important. This podcast should be interesting to anyone interested in monitoring site statistics or improving a blog or site based on access information.

First of all, I want to welcome you all back to Maria Speaks. I said I’d try to publish podcasts more frequently and I’ve failed miserably. I suspect that it’s because I can’t always think of topics that are podcast-worthy. So, in an effort to release podcasts more frequently, I’ll throw the concept of podcast worthiness out the window and do short podcasts about the things I think my readers and site visitors will find interesting.. Since most of my podcasts are less than 10 minutes long, they’re really not a burden to download. If you happen to download one on a topic you don’t think is worthy of your time, just delete it.

Of course, you can always suggest podcast topics for me. It’s easy. Just go to aneclecticmind.com and use the Contact button at the top of any page to shoot me an e-mail message with your suggestion. I can’t make promises, but having something specific to talk about can sure get me started.

Now on to today’s topic: Site Stats.

I’m one of those people who love statistics. There’s something about numbers that I really like and when I get numbers that communicate real information — especially useful information — I’m in seventh heaven.

I’ve been running at least one Web site since 1995 or thereabouts. Before that, starting back in 1989, I ran a BBS — that’s short for bulletin board system. If you’re too old to remember those, imagine an online system with file downloads and discussion forums. Mine ran on a Mac SE/30 with a pair of 28.8 kbps modems.

Since 1989, I’ve been monitoring access of my BBS or Web sites. Sometimes I did it with software I purchased just for the purpose. Sometimes I did it with solutions I cooked up myself. For example, I had a kick butt FileMaker Pro database that would crunch the stats from my old WebSTAR sites and turn them into reports. The only trouble is, the darn scripts sometimes took hours to run. There was just too much data.

With my current blog-based sites, I have a variety of tools for monitoring access and checking site stats. It’s not because I need multiple tools. It’s because I just can’t decide on which ones I like best.

The four I’m playing with now include SiteMeter, W3Counter, Performancing Metrics, and WP-ShortStat.

  • SiteMeter, which is a free Web-based solution, puts a counter on the Web page. You can see it in action on our WordPress book companion Web site, wpvqs.com. But SiteMeter is more than just an ugly counter. Click it to display statistics about site visitors, page views, referrers, and more. There are even more statistics for an administrator than what is available for visitors to see. A subscription version with more features is also available.
  • w3Counter is another free Web-based solution that puts a counter on the Web page and keeps track of all kinds of statistics on its own site. And a subscription version with more features is also available. It was recommended to me by a blog reader who read my article about SiteMeter. He suggested it as an alternative and I tried it out. I liked it better, so I replaced the counter on my personal site, aneclecticmind.com, with a w3Counter counter.
  • Performancing Metrics is another free Web-based solution. It’s associated with the Performancing.com site, which has a lot of tips and ideas for bloggers. I figured I’d give it a try. Unfortunately, it does not seem to work well with WordPress. I’ve tried two different versions of the JavaScript code that must be inserted in my template file and even tried a WordPress-specific plugin. The stats I get are pretty meaningless. So I’m putting that on hold for a while. Perhaps I’ll get it to work right in the future. But if you’re looking for a solution and you don’t use WordPress, it’s definitely worth trying out.
  • WP-ShortStat is a WordPress plugin that keeps track of site access information and displays statistics right within a WordPress administration panel. It’s a nice little software package and I currently use it on my helicopter tour and charter Web site, FlyingMAir.com. If you’re a WordPress user and want to try this out, be sure to check out a tip I wrote on our WordPress book companion Web site where I explain how to get it to work right if it won’t work right out-of-the-box (so to speak).

Today I took a close look at the stats for the past month on aneclecticmind.com. I did it primarily to get a better picture of what was popular on the site, but as I took notes about what I saw, I realized that the information might be interesting to podcast listeners, especially those folks interested in starting or improving their own sites or blogs.

Before I get started, I need to define some terms.

  • A visitor is someone who comes to your site and browses around for a while. He might view one page or a dozen, but he’s doing it all during one session. Unique visitors is a subset of visitors. A visitor might come to your site five times in a specific day; if so, he’s counted as five visitors but just one unique visitor. A new visitor is a visitor who has never been to the site before. And a returning visitor is a visitor who has come back for more.
  • A hit or page hit is a page loaded for a visitor to view. In the old days — and probably still with some software — hits could include not just html or php content, but media within that content. So if an html page included five images, loading the page could count as six hits. That’s a really meaningless number. The stats software I use counts page hits only, which is far more meaningful.

My site, aneclecticmind.com only gets 100 to 200 visitors and a few hundred page hits a day. Could be better, could be worse. I’m not complaining. What I wanted to know was what these visitors were looking at, when they were visiting, and who sent them. That’s where my statistics software helped out.

For example, looking at visitor timing, I could see that I get more visitors at the beginning or end of the week than midweek. During that period, I also get more hits per visitor.

Looking at visitors and hits on a day-to-day perspective, I see that the vast majority of my visits and hits occur right around 4 PM local time. (Arizona is always 7 hours behind GMT; in the summer, we’re in the same time zone as California; in the winter, we’re the same as Colorado.) I can also see that I get more visitors between 9 AM and 4 PM than after 4 PM. Those visitors are looking at more pages, too. Could they be surfing my way during working hours? Sure looks that way to me.

The most visitors I had during the past month was on July 6. Oddly enough, the most page hits I had for the past month was on July 5. So more visitors viewed fewer pages on July 6. That seems odd to me.

The most popular pages on my site are, in order:

  • Home Page – 20% of the views
  • Books Page – 3% of the views
  • Excel Visual QuickProject Guide Book Support Page – 3% of the views
  • Excel Visual QuickStart Guide Book Support Page – 2% of the views
  • Mac OS X Visual QuickStart Guide Book Support Page – 2% of the views

This tells me that people come to my site to learn more about my books, specifically the books I’ve written about Excel and Mac OS X. To better serve those visitors so they come back for more, I should write more articles about those topics.

Next, I looked at information about the computers my site’s visitors were using to access the site. That’s where I got a few surprises.

First of all, a full 75% of my site’s visitors access the site using Windows XP while only 12% access using Mac OS X. Now you might think that’s a high percentage of Mac OS X users, but when you consider the fact that most of my work is about Mac OS X, the high percentage of users seems reasonable. What seems odd to me is that so many visitors access using Windows PCs. I do write books about Windows software — as a matter of fact, I’ve written several about Word and Excel — but I’ve never considered myself a Windows author. So the 75% figure seems outrageously high to me. It also suggests that I should write fewer articles on my site about Mac OS-specific topics and more about cross-platform or Windows-specific topics. That’ll take some doing, since I really prefer writing about Macs.

On the browser front, 60% of my site’s visitors use Microsoft Internet Explorer, with most of those using Explorer 6. 23% use Firefox, which is my preferred browser. A bunch of other browsers were listed, of course, as well as a PlayStation 2, which I didn’t even know could access the Web. (I’m willing to bet my site looked pretty crappy on that device.) This is important information, too. I recently discovered that Explorer for Windows is more likely to choke on XHTML and CSS errors than any other browser. In fact, with an error on one of my sites, none of the pages on that site rendered correctly in Explorer. That means that 60% of the site’s visitors weren’t getting the intended user experience. I’ve since fixed the problem, of course, but now I’ll be extra careful to prevent similar problems in the future.

I also noted that 90% of site visitors had monitor resolution set to 1024 x 768 pixels or larger. That’s good news. It means that very, very few people need to use the horizontal scroll bars to see page content. (Horizontal scrolling is a big no-no.) But it also means that I could redesign the site to make each fixed-width page a bit wider to take advantage of the screen real estate my site’s visitors have at their disposal. Wider pages mean larger images, which could make a better visitor experience.

Another important stat is referrers — that’s how you can find out where your site’s visitors come from. On my site, more than 60% of visitors come from search engines. 25% come from direct visits or bookmarks — in other words, the visitor either typed a URL in the address bar of their browser or used a bookmark to visit me.

Of the search engine referrals, 89% came from Google, 5% came from Yahoo!, and 3% came from MSN. Google is obviously widely used and I’m fortunate through some sort of dumb luck, I suppose, to rank highly in Google search results.

The top search phrases are the most fun. Obviously, my stats software listed dozens of them. Here are the top 5 for the past month; you can use them in Google to find the pages they refer to yourself:

  • drying cherries – 41 searches
  • maria langer – 31 searches
  • howard mesa ranch – 16 searches
  • bookmark synchronizer se – 13 searches
  • bisquick quiche – 9 searches

Although my cherry drying article is one of the top 20 articles on my site, it’s odd to me that none of the search phrases — other than my own name, of course — refer to any of the top 5 visited pages. Whodathunk I’d get nine page hits for people searching for Biquick recipes?

Reading through the list of search phrases also provides valuable insight as to how users construct searches. For example, a recent search phrase that brought a visitor to my site was “number of vehicles enter and depart at Lukeville border.” The searcher was treated to an article about my recent helicopter flight along the border with an ASU photojournalist.

This is just an example of the kinds of stats some of the stats solutions can provide. If you think these things through, you can use them to improve your site and make it more interesting to visitors. Hopefully, that’ll generate more visits and page hits, especially if you have something valuable to share.

Do you use stats software? How do you use it? Visit the transcript for this podcast at aneclecticmind.com and use the comments link to share your thoughts. I’ll read the comments I get in a future podcast.

That’s all for now. Thanks for listening. Keep checking in. I’ll be podcasting again soon.

site, statistics, metrics, Web, development, traffic

On the Intelligence of Quotes

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Maria Speaks Episode 27: On the Intelligence of Quotes.

This short podcast is a reading from a recent article I wrote on my book support site for Microsoft Word users. It explains the difference between smart and straight quotes and tells you how to work with them in Microsoft Word. You can read the transcript of this podcast and see the accompanying screenshots at www.aneclecticmind.com

Transcripts:

Curly or “smart” quotes are single and double quote marks that curve in toward what they surround. This blog, if viewed in the intended font, displays all quotes as smart quotes. Smart quotes are also often referred to as “typographers” quotes because they’re common in printed work like books, magazine articles, and other documents.

You may not realize it, but a smart quote character is actually a different character than its corresponding straight quote. Think about it: it has to be. After all, it looks different, doesn’t it? That means it has to be a different character.

These characters are easy to type on a Macintosh. For example, to get the “ character, type Option-[. to get the ’ character, type Shift-Option-]. (Although there must be some way to type these in on a Windows computer, I don’t know how to do it; perhaps a reader can use the Comments link to share the keystrokes?)

Special CharactersIn Word, you can also use the Special Characters pane of the Symbols dialog. Choose Insert > Symbol to display the dialog and click the Special Characters tab or button. Scroll down to find the character you want (they’re listed at the bottom of the list) and double-click the one you want to insert it. This is a rather cumbersome way to get the job done, but it does work.

AutoFormat as You TypeFortunately, Word offers a better, automated way. You can set an option in the AutoFormat as you Type pane of the AutoCorrect dialog that will automatically convert every straight quote you type to the corresponding smart quote. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click the AutoFormat as You Type tab or button in the dialog that appears. Then turn on the “Straight quotes” with “Smart quotes” check box. (As you can see, that’s the only feature I have enabled in this pane on my copy of Word; I don’t like Word messing with the formatting of what I type, as I discuss in “Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them.”) Click OK to save your setting.

From that point on, every time you type a single or double quote, Word will convert it to a smart quote. If your computer isn’t very fast, you might actually be able to see the conversion happen. And, if you use Word’s Undo feature, you can undo the conversion to revert the character back to the regular quote you typed.

I should mention here that this feature is enabled by default, so if you never changed this setting and you want smart quotes, you don’t have to do a thing to get them.

Now suppose you have a document that was typed without smart quotes. Perhaps a passage of text copied from a Web site or a document someone wrote with a plain old text editor. You want to dress up the document for printing and smart quotes are important to you. Do you have to retype all those quotes to “educate” them? Heck no! Just use Find and Replace.

Find and ReplaceFirst double check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” feature is enabled as discussed above. Then choose Edit > Replace to display the Find and Replace window. Type the same plain old double quote character in the Find What and Replace With boxes. Then click Replace All. Word will replace the dumb double quotes with the correct smart quotes and tell you how many it replaced. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog. Then type the same plain old single quote character in the Find What and Replace with boxes and click Replace All. Word replaces all the dumb single quotes with smart single quotes. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog and close the Find and Replace window.

If you do this a lot, you might consider writing a macro that does the job for you. But that’s beyond the scope of this article.

What if you have a document with smart quotes and you need to turn them into straight quotes? Easy enough. Follow the same process, but before you use the Find and Replace window, check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” option is turned off. Find and Replace should dumb up the quotes.

Now that you know the tricks, there’s no reason why your Word documents shouldn’t have the smartest quotes around.

Microsoft, Word, smart quotes