Whats up with Hatim!

On this previous monday I recieved my Google Summer of Code payment card. Its a Master Card from some finance related company run by General Electric. It does not have my name on it, instead it has a number and GSOC 2008 Stundet written on it. The card had no value on it and had a number written on it to enable it. It was a US 1-800 number. I had a hunch that skype should let me call 1-800 numbers for free, and a google search confirmed it. I activated my card at no cost :).

I had been feeling the need to store statistics for my website for some time now since I moved off from a Cpanel host and on to a VPS. I asked around and was suggested that I should try out Google Analytics. I had seen Google Analytics being used in a client project as well so I decided to give it a try. It was relatively easy to setup with a google account (I just had to paste some generated java script code into my main typo theme layout file).

There are many thing which I have not even touched in Analytics but they are all geared towards increasing your site traffic (including managing campgains, checking out where are the traffic sources etc). One can also export the reports in XML and PDF (which is good as this means that I am not bound to Google Analytics for ever , if I decide to move over I will use the XML to migrate my data). I now have a measure on how many unique vistors are coming to my site and from which location. I have yet to find in Google Analytics how to check for user IPs though (ping me if you know how to do that)

Google analytics can be described in one word "awsome".