Blog Update

Somewhat spurred on by the redesign of the AppsLab last week, I decided to (finally) do a little redesign myself.

Friday night I spent about 6 hours on it.

Minus a few minor modifications, I had been using the original design I started with 2 years ago. I liked it as it was fairly simple and allowed for a lot of space for code (as opposed to the limited width blogger templates). In fact, anytime a technical friend starts one up, I suggest the use of a screen wide template because inevitably, their code examples will not look so good.

First thing I did was remove almost all of the <div>/<span> tags. I've never liked them. I prefer the old <table> tag approach. Of course I am not a web guy or designer by trade, so I probably miss out on the advantages...actually, I don't use them like they do so who cares. Apparently the differences are great amongst some in the web community, religious I would dare to say. Table tags are like putting the commas where they should go, at the end of the line. The span/div tags are like putting them in front.

That was tedious to say the least.

Also inspired by Rich's redesign of their social media buttons:



I decided to do the same. A couple of times. What's up top is what I ended up with. A brief survey on Twitter has some people not liking them. What do you think?

I like them because I made them (mostly). Of the 6 hours, probably 4 were spent in Gimp trying to create those silly things. The idea was simple, I wanted more real-estate on the side and there seemed to be a bit of unused space up top.

Tell me what you think in the comments. Good? Bad? Indifferent?

While I'm on the subject of the blog, I've been trying to reconcile the differences in numbers between the statistics that are gathered. There are three services I use: GoDaddy, their default web server statistics they provide, Google Analytics which I've been using since the beginning, and most recently, Quantcast.

Here are the last 2 years from Google Analytics:



Here they are from the web server statistics (GoDaddy):



I have no idea what that large spike is...here are the numbers for the last 9 months:



Of course there is no explanation of what is a "request" and a "page request." I'm pretty sure I've never had 242K hits. I can only assume that "request" includes all the objects that are downloaded with each page (css/images/javascript/etc). Which leaves me with page requests. Neither Analytics or Quantcast has ever shown a number in the tens of thousands (though last month did show a total of about 10k page views). Not really sure what to make of it though. I'd love to say that I'm getting 60K hits per month, but I don't believe that to be the case.

Anyway, if you know the difference let me know.