I just got another blogging gig writing hardware reviews for another website.  I’m extremely happy about this because it’s giving me a chance to grow my writing skills.  Hopefully this gig will lead to something else and will help me continue my career as a blogger.

This month represents the first full month of The Computer Zone and I’m pleased to announce that it went really well. I wrote 17 great articles this month and unlike last month where I was just porting them over from the old site, all of these articles were written during this month. I also received more page views this month than I did visitors last month. Here are my statistics for the month of November:

Visitors: 1717
Page Views: 2112
Visitors / Day: 57
Page Views / Day: 70
Avg Feed numbers: 20 subscribers

Last night I went to the Air Canada Center in Toronto and saw the Trans-Siberian Orchestra play live. I have to admit, at first I really didn’t know what to expect. I was a little reluctant to go because the tickets were $60 and I just don’t have that much money coming up to the Christmas season. Am I ever glad I went.

The show was absolutely amazing. There were amazing musicians, a great light show and in general, probably one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to in my life. If anyone hasn’t ever seen them live I would totally suggest doing so. Here’s a link to their tour dates.

The Computer Zone has relocated to http://thecompzone.com. This move was done for a few reasons.

1. I felt it was time to start branding the blog. I was tired with having the blog underneath of Easy C Tutorials. The Computer Zone had nothing to do with programming tutorials. Most of the people coming to the blog were coming through the tutorials and had no interest in the topics. It was frustrating seeing so many bounces. Hopefully this will change now that it has it’s own domain
2. Google seemed to have excluded all posts from here on their search engine. I don’t really know why but I hope they’ll let me back with the new domain
3. I got bored and bought the domain.

If you’d like the subscribe to the new post feeds you can do so with this link and the comment feeds here. I hope to see you guys come over to the new site. I have a bunch of exciting posts lined up starting on the 15th. Currently I’m just re-posting old posts over the next few days.

A few things I’m looking forward to with the new site is:

• An upcoming new design
• A better posting schedule
• My own domain

I’ll see you there.

Yesterday Easy C Tutorials experienced a prolonged downtime from about 10:00AM EST to around 4 or 5:00PM and I’d like to apologize to everyone that visited. Media Temple (our hosting service) was extremely quick to fix the problem once they knew about it.

Downtime is a problem that has plagued every blogger at one point or another. Maybe you were changing themes and had to take the site down for a few minutes, or maybe your hosting provider encountered a problem and your site(s) didn’t load for a while (like me). Whatever causes the downtime it can hurt your blogs reputation if it happens often so the question is what can you do to minimize your downtime?

Monitor Your Sites
One of the reasons why you’ll rarely see a large blog/site down for any extended period of time is because they monitor their sites religiously. If their site goes down for any length of time they lose money, simple as that. If you don’t monitor your site how are you supposed to know that it’s running slow? Emails? A friend telling you? Monitoring your site is definitely the quickest way to make sure your site is running properly.

Monitoring your site doesn’t have to mean that you’re on it 24/7. If you have more important things, and unless you’re a professional blogger you probably do, go and do those things and check in from time to time. At a minimum you should be checking your site at least once a day. If theres a problem and it’s lasting longer than a day you’re going to lose a lot of viewers. When a viewer comes to a site and sees that it’s down they often remember and will avoid the site from then on. This is one of the biggest reasons to minimize your sites downtime.

Contact Your Hosting Provider
Once you know that your sites down (or unusually slow), the next thing to do is to contact whoever is hosting your site. Often times it’ll be a problem with the server that they’re using to host your site. When I contacted MediaTemple to tell them about the lagginess of my site they responded very quickly telling me that they were resolving the issue as quick as they could. This kept me calm and I knew that my blog would soon be up. If you don’t contact them however they may not know that there is even a problem. If you’re a paying customer then they’ll most likely be quick to fix it because they want to keep your business.

“I’ve contacted them and they don’t seem to be doing anything to fix the problem” I’ve heard of a few people who ran into this problem, with their hosting provider not really caring about the problem. At this point you have to decide whether the service they provide is worth the downtimes then theres nothing you can do. If it’s not worth it you can threaten to leave if they don’t fix the problem. If they don’t fix the downtime quickly, leave, find a new hosting provider.

Try Other Fixes
If your site is just taking a long time to load (isn’t completely down), try putting a small static index page telling the viewers that your site is currently experiencing technical difficulties and will soon be back up. Hopefully this page will load quicker since it is small and wouldn’t have any PHP (or whatever SSLs you use). This fix really only works if your site is experiencing slow load times. It won’t help if you’re site is totally down.

These are a few things you can do to minimize the amount of downtime your site will see. In the end though everyone experiences downtimes and you just have to deal with it. Hopefully your site will experience downtime as few times as possible.

Easy C Tutorials is celebrating its second month of life. While this definitely isn’t that big of a deal since some blogs have been around for years but I’m still proud of my creation. I’m surprised that I’ve actually kept around long enough and continued to post even though school is going on.

This month’s statistic and blogging tips are about statistical counters and which ones I use. Here’s a list of things I use on my site to keep track of my visitors:

• Feedburner:
  Most of you know what Feedburner is and what it’s used for. For those who don’t, Feedburner is a feed “enhancer”. It takes your default feeds, and ads more functionality to it without you having to modify it yourself. Feedburner also allows you to keep track of everyone who has subscribed to your feed. This gives you a general impression on whether or not people like reading your stuff. I use Feedburner to keep track of my feed subscribers as well as make my feeds nice
• Sitemeter:
  Sitemeter is simply a tool that keeps track of your visitors. All you have to do is signup, add a few lines of javascript to your blog (they supply the code) and then watch your statistics flow in. The great thing about Sitemeter is that it’s real time statistics. You can see the statistics as the people visit your site. There are a few problems with Sitemeter though. The first problem is that it only holds data for the last 100 people unless you sign up for their premium service (which is $6.95/month or more). The second problem I have with Sitemeter is that unless you sign up for their premium service you have to place a little graphic on your page. While this graphic isn’t too obtrusive it doesn’t look great. Oh well I guess thats the price you pay for real time statistics
• Google Analytics:
  Google Analytics is basically the same as Sitemeter except it doesn’t give real time statistics and fixes all of Sitemeter’s problems. Google Analytics gives you detailed information on every visitor that comes to your page. It gives you search details, referral details and more. The only problem I’ve ever had with Google Analytics is that it only updates once per day (hence why I use Sitemeter). Other than that it’s really good. You can look at almost every aspect of your blog as well as an overlay of your blog and the number of clicks there (this is extremely helpful for advertising). I prefer Google Analytics over Sitemeter any day of the week.

I use these three statistical counters to view the performance of my blog and I know a lot of other bloggers use them as well. If you have any that you use feel free to comment about them.

Now on to Septembers Statistics

My goals for September were as follows:

1. Get over 3300 visitors and 5000 page views.
2. Increase the average visitors time on the site to 2 minutes or more.

So how did I do?
Visitors: 2862
Page Views: 4602
PV per Visit: 1.61
PV per Day: 153
Visitor per Day: 95
Time on the Site: 1:54

So I didn’t actually make any of the goals that I had set out to make but I’m still extremely pleased with my stats, wanna know why? With the start of September came another year of University for me. With the start of University came a decrease in the number of posts. I haven’t posted a new tutorial since September 6th. While I’ve still kept posting in my blog the number of posts have decreased.

I’m pleased with my stats because they show that I can still get visitors even without posting every day (or week in the case of tutorials). I’m not going to make any goals for the month of October because I’m going to try to post a lot more so I really have no idea whats going to happen.

What can you expect from October
Well you can expect a lot of things. First theres going to be a few tutorials this month, one of them will be on pointers and I haven’t thought of the other one yet. As for this blog you can expect a week long series on “Technology in our lives” coming soon. You can also expect a few posts on Halloween gadgets and safety. I’m doing this do try to capture seasonal search traffic. Well those are a few things to expect in the month to come. I hope you stay around and continue reading.

So it’s been a few days since I’ve written anything (22 days for a tutorial and 4 days since my last blog entry) and I thought I’d give an update on what’s been going on.

I recently started Facebook Poker and I’m currently writing tutorials for that. Two of my articles got publish at Pocket Twos a popular poker site so I was really happy about that. I also start my 3rd year at the University of Guelph for CompSci. This is taking up a lot more of my time then I had hoped so it’s one of the biggest reasons why posting has slowed down.

In other news this blog might be moved to a more personal site eventually. I’m considering starting another site specifically for this blog. It just doesn’t really belong with the tutorials. I’m also designing a different look for Easy C Tutorials. I’m still unsure of what kind of look to go with so if anyone has any suggestions feel free to email them to me at admin[at]easyctutorials.com

I think thats about it. I’ll be releasing a week long feature on “Technology in our Lives” soon.