With the announcement of the release of Sparky for FF users, I was pleased to see this information now available to users. Of course, it is always good to be one of the earlier posters! John Chow also picked up on this story, too!

Alexa ratings aren’t entirely accurate especially for lower rankings, nor are they regarded as important by too many people. But, for many webmasters, ranking well is a priority for financial reasons. Therefore, one question that was asked before:

How could Alexa record all the traffic to my site? The IE toolbar was insufficient for a long time for most FF users, and wasn’t particularly accurate at recording traffic levels. Even with the new plugin for FF, you will miss a lot of traffic from those who DON’T or can’t install the plugins in their browser.

The easy solution: install one of the ‘widgets’ for your website. There are three flavors that you can choose from:

• Alexa Traffic Graph – Put an Alexa Traffic History Graph in your site. Enter up to 3 sites in the boxes below. Traffic Graphs are dynamically updated daily.
• Alexa Site Stats Button – Alexa info about any site can easily be incorporated into your site.
• Alexa Traffic Rank Button – This simple little widget allows you to place a traffic rank button/widget onto your site.

By scrolling down to the bottom of this you will discover what I have chosen: the simplest choice!

I’m continually surprised how well Gmail works when it comes to spam. If your other mailboxes are overflowing with unwanted mail and spam, you couldn’t do much better than to redirect as much of your mail to a gmail box as possible.

This is a picture of my spam mailbox. As a result of the success of the Spam folder and Google’s Spam filters, very little junk mail ends up in my Inbox. It’s difficult to give a precise percentage for my experience: but it could be in the range of 0.5% or less per day. In other words, most days there are no surprises!

Yahoo! on the other hand provides a large mailbox but their mail filtering technology really allows too much crap to get in. Out of about 25 mails on the first screen, a good 3 or 4 (sometimes a lot more) are usually spam mails. That’s not helpful. I also get Spammed by a local company whose emails Yahoo! do not allow me to block. Admittedly, much of the spam in Yahoo! comes from mailing lists that were unscrupulous, and the account is an old one.

Don’t get me started on HoTMaiL. Almost as soon as you register, your inbox starts filling with junk mail. I deleted my old hotmail account, but had to restore it for MSN messaging.

Effective Tools in GMail

1. The Spam Folder (or ‘tag’) is quite effective and almost 100% automatic. Flagging mails in your Inbox as spam can also help this, but there is little to trouble you here, except the ‘Move to Inbox’ option and the ‘Delete all spam messages now’ link. For tweaking, though, you can use ‘filters’ in the settings menu to create as many filters as you need to handle both regular email and the occasionally stubborn spam that refuses to live in your Spam Folder. For further tips on dealing with Spam at Gmail.

2. Aliases: I don’t use them myself, but this is what Google says:

Gmail doesn’t offer traditional aliases, but you can receive messages sent to your.username+any.alias@gmail.com. For example, messages sent to jane.doe+notes@gmail.com are delivered to jane.doe@gmail.com. You can set up filters to automatically direct these messages to Trash, apply a label or star, skip the inbox, or forward to another email account.

3. Redirecting mail from your other domains to GMail.

In your webpanel or Cpanel, you can create forwarding addresses that will allow you to receive your email at, for example, admin@yourdomain.com, which you can then forward to your Gmail account. This also allows you to have throw-away email addresses for single purpose. Once the purpose is fulfilled, you simply delete the email address and boom, mail is stopped. Very useful, if you find that you are advertising a job, that is placed all over the Internet with your email address on it!

How do you deal with spam email at Google? Have you found any effective techniques?

The last few weeks have been quite stressful for me as I’ve been involved with the marketing of our business, as we carried out several promotional activities to increase enrolments. Unfortunately for this blog, that meant that I haven’t been posting as regularly as I was before.

Why is this important? Well, it has encouraged me to think about the goals for this blog, and the timescale that I have available for developing this website. Even if you come out with the same decisions, the process of re-evaluating your current goals and timescale can uncover some valuable considerations that led you to the goals in the first place. Occasionally, a deeper insight into your original motivations will confirm that you were right in the first place.

Some questions to consider:

1. what are the goals for your blog in the short-term and longer-term?

2. how much time do you have to devote to the blog: its design, marketing and content creation?

3. at certain times, you will be required to do more than at other times, such as at creation, when you have other commitments, before vacations, so how can you cope with such surges in activity?

4. what posting schedule do you think you can keep on a regular basis? it doesn’t matter what the schedule is, but regularity is a blessing to your visitors

5. are you happy with the levels of traffic you are getting? do you have sufficient time, resources and skills to create further traffic?

6. are you content with the direction, content and feedback that you are getting on your blog? if you aren’t, can you clarify what the underlying weaknesses are?

It’s wise to consider these questions as part of your review of your blog’s situation. Writing is very much a recursive process, even though blogging isn’t necessarily so. In our blogs, it’s quite likely that we will revisit the same topics again, and again, as our circle of competence grows. This is part of the natural ‘blogging’ environment.