Archive for March, 2008

Keeping Up With The Jones.com (Some online competitive analysis tools)

Monday, March 17th, 2008

It’s always good to know what your competition is up to, so naturally, if they have blogs, you should subscribe.

A few other useful tools:

Traffic Stats:

I’ve found 3 good tools that track traffic. None of theme seem to be overly accurate for small sites. Even for medium sites the numbers often don’t match the truth. (Comparing visitor stats from google analytics vs these tools shows a very significant underestimation for me). I know these stats sites track mostly US visits, but even taking into account that they seem to underestimate. I use them with the hop that they equally underestimate everyone.

Here are 3 sites that I use to check stats:

Alexa: (often said to be inaccurate by techcrunch)

http://www.alexa.com/search?q=www.momentville.com

Quantcast: (They do a good job of providing more info about the type of visits)

http://www.quantcast.com/momentville.com

Compete: (they have pretty graphs that let you compareup to 5 websites at a time)

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/momentville.com/

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Simple Javascript to detect browser details

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Sometimes users of MomentVille will report a problem. It may be a javascript or css problem. Often, the first bit of info I need to find out is what browser they are using, and what their screen resolution is.

I thought it might be too tricky to get them to give me these details reliably, so I made a simple page that gives me the details I want. I just ask them to go to that page and copy and paste the text in an email. (Fortunately I don’t have to use it too often, but when I do it makes things easy).

The file looks as follows:


<html>
 <head>
  <title>Browser Check</title>
 </head>
 <body>
  <h3> Browser Info </h3>
  <br>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
document.write("navigator.appName " + navigator.appName + "<BR>");
document.write("navigator.userAgent " + navigator.userAgent + "<BR>");
document.write("navigator.appVersion " + navigator.appVersion + "<BR>");
//-->
</script>
  <h3> Resolution Info </h3>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
document.write("screen.width " + screen.width + "<BR>");
document.write("screen.height " + screen.height + "<BR>");
document.write("document.body.clientWidth" + document.body.clientWidth + "<BR>");
document.write("document.body.clientHeight" + document.body.clientHeight + "<BR>");
//-->
</script>
</body>
</html>

To see it in action check out: http://www.momentville.com/check_browser.html

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