Ever wanted to find out what your users have been up to before they came to your site? Yep, you now have that power. I can see that little twinkle in your eyes now. You’re thinking that this is just insane and you can only imagine the power that now lies at your fingertips. Well, it’s not that easy.

How It Works

First of all, stop freaking out. We’re not exactly stealing your browser’s history. We’re doing a bit of guessing. It can only be run against a defined list of sites. This means that you can only check whether someone has visited a site, say Disney.com, but you can’t ask their browser for a list of the sites they’ve visited. That information is still kept confidential by the browser.

What we do is use some JavaScript to check the color of the links on a page. Ahhh, I see the lil’ light bulb going on over your head right now. Yep folks, that’s all. Nothing fancy. So rest at ease, your browser history is safe for the most part.

SpyJax: Go check it out, and figure out how to stop it, or at least limit the way people use it on you.

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Now I’ve never really been a Photoshop guy. I just don’t have an eye for that stuff, even if it may be very basic. What’s my solution? My Cool Button. This service allows you to created, not to bad if I do say so myself, Web 2.0 buttons on the fly.

A lil’ PHP and GD2 sure does go a long way these days.

Popularity: 6%

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Lately, I’ve been having some issues with me web host. It’s just been crawling lately with a lot of outages. Also, my apologies for the lack of posts, but along with these host problems, I’ve been having my own PC problems also.

It seems like right now computers on a whole don’t really like me. But I promise, I’ll be with you guys soon.

Stay tuned!

Popularity: 3%

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Now I know I’m late, very late. But I finally decided to find out what all the fuss was about. The great thing about Widgets is that you can drag them all over the place. Of course, they are made for the sidebar, but you can reorder them however you like or just remove them. And the great thing is removing doesn’t mean deleting. They are there to be reused at your whim and fancy. Here is an example of what Widgets can do for you:

Widgets are, however, a bit awkward to design. A lot of plugins these days come with widgets built in, but there are those that don’t. For these, it’s a bit of a pain to use.

For this purpose we have the King Text + PHP Widget Plugin. This plugin enables you to define empty plugins that you can paste text, HTML, or even PHP into.

I’ve converted all of my blogs (except this one :)) to use Widgets. It takes a bit of time to set up, at first, but the flexibility they offer you is just great.

Popularity: 4%

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Google has upgraded their beautiful and free Google Analytics for tracking traffic on your website. It’s all flash and beautiful.

There are a lot of new features that I haven’t yet investigated, but what I do know, is that it’s pretty, lol.

Just one thing to note however, I can’t seem to find the place where they have average visits. You know, the average number of visits per day? In all the adding of new stuff tehy must have overlooked it guess.

Read More:

• Google Analytics New Beta Interface
• Google Analytics Is Re-Launched: Do These Five Things First In V2
• The New Google Analytics
• More Than a Face Lift for Google Analytics

Popularity: 3%

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Recently, I’ve had a problem with a blog that I manage. Due to a server issue, the database was totally screwed up. It was weird. The first thing I noticed is that the posts for the last five (5) or so days were gone. I thought that some absent minded tech had inadvertently restored a previous backup.

Then I noticed that not only posts were gone, but some settings reverted back to their original values. Upon closer inspection, I realized that certain entries in certain tables in the database were deleted. Hmmph, who knows what the problem was. So I figure that it should be a simple enough task to get a backup from my web host. I was wrong about that, very wrong.

Now let me first state that I was also wrong in not maintaining my own database backups. There is absolutely no excuse for this, so I take full blame for my problem. If I had a database back up, I wouldn’t have been in the situation that I’m in right now. Anyway, moving on. After over 4 days of moving back and forth with tech support, they were able to supply me with their earliest backup, which was dated the day after my database meltdown. So I was screwed, or was I?

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Web 2.0 has been really spreading like wildfire the past few years, but there area few sites that have really taken total advantage of it and used it to the fullest. Here’s the big list of 10:

1. MySpace
2. YouTube
3. FaceBook
4. Wikipedia
5. Bebo
6. Digg
7. Flickr
8. Netvibes
9. Del.icio.us
10. Meebo

The first 4 aren’t a big surprise. These are the big contenders in the game right now. I thought Digg and Flickr would have a higher ranking though. What does surprise me is Meebo in at number 10. It’s great to see a new start up gaining ground so fast.

Source: 10 Most Successful Web 2.0 Startups To Date - rev2.org

Popularity: 4%

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Weebly has finally launched, well again. What is Weebly? It’s online website creation using the latest and greatest of web 2.0. It’s a WYSIWYG editor, but so much more. You can choose to host you website at Weebly, where you will get a sub-domain, or you can host at your own domain. For the latter option you will need to change the CNAME records of your domain name so that they point to whaterver.weebly.com.

Everything is done in a drag and drop interface: pictures, text, headings, even page titles. It reminds me of Google’s website creator just a bit.

One interesting thing that I’ve seen is the way you can preview different designs or themes. As soon as you hover over the theme the entire page changes to show you how it would look.

Check out Weebly if you’re not into all this nitty gritty web stuff.

Popularity: 6%

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