Stumble Upon is a neat tool for web browsing.  I won’t get into the pros and cons of it but will show an easy way to see which of the pages on your site have been “stumbled.”  Some website owners might be interested in seeing what people have come across and added to StumbleUpon.  Some analytic systems don’t do a good job of showing you which page people are hitting.

You will need to run Firefox (actually, i don’t know if this will work in IE) and install the Stumbe Upon toolbar.

Go to Google and do a search formatted like this:

I used “zieak” as the search term and only looked for that word on my own domain.  As long as you pick a word or set of words that you have in the title of your pages (or sidebar or similar universal spot) this should work.

In the results some of your pages may look like this:

Note the StumbleUpon logo and the star.  Every result that have these icons is in the Stumble Upon system.  In my case, i think all of my stumbled pages are in the top results.  You may want to change your settings to show more than 10 results per page to make it easier to scan your site if you have thousands of results. Click on preferences to the right of the Google search bar.

Then change the setting in the drop-down menu for the number of results.

Now without too much hassle you can check and see which of your pages are being stumbled.  Clicking on the icons lets you see the page on Stumble Upon about your content.

I wrote this up in response to a Twitter question posted by alightheart.

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Prepping for Juneau

Originally uploaded by zieak

Today we stopped by Frank and Angie’s and picked up a Thule cargo box for the roof. When we got home I worked on stripping copper wire that I have accumulated and prepping brass and aluminum to be sold as scrap. I tracked down a place that does buy some scrap metal and they are close to the ferry terminal so we can unload the metal immediately after we arrive.

We’re taking the fast ferry so it only takes about 4 hours to get there. We leave Friday and will be back Tuesday. Seth and Khanh are also coming. We’re staying with Bern and Wendie in Douglas.

We have reservations for dinner at the Hangar on Friday night. I imagine we’ll hike Mount Roberts, ride the tram down, tour the brewery, and fill the cargo box with toilet paper from Costco.

Bad cat

Originally uploaded by zieak

Every now and then the kittens unroll some toilet paper. We have settled on putting the TP on the roll the “wrong” way to prevent the cats from easily removing it. This was the first time that they pulled a full roll out of the closet though. Brats!

Unlike my porch

Originally uploaded by zieak

Last night we went to Mitch’s birthday party for a little while. (I know! Monday?) Apparently at this home they discourage peeing off of the porch.

…and perhaps to affiliate programs easier.  I just installed a WordPress plugin that should insert a specified link automatically every time i use an associated word or phrase in a post.  Hopefully now all i need to do is say that when Kevin was in Petersburg he still refused to eat seafood and the sentence ill have links.  This should help my friends, family, and sites to build links with less effort on my part.  I should finally be able to use affiliate links for sites like Amazon with less hassle too.  Huge thanks to the Web Developers that came up with this beauty!

It looks like Trip Advisor is sending out another free item.  This appears to be a reusable bage to use for your carry-on toiletries.  I never received the luggage tags but did end up receiving the hat.  For a free hat it is actually pretty nice.  I even wear it sometimes!  Go get your free bag before they are out!

I mentioned my rotation through hosts in the past and probably sounded pretty happy right now.  I am.  But i was happy with my previous hosts until i shopped around and saw what others were offering.  Maybe it is time for me to start looking for feature-rich but cheap web hosting again.

Some seem to offer significant one-time perks like Yahoo or Google “credit.”  I really need the ability to host unlimited domains because of the number of sites, forwarded domains (ever go to zieak.net? or cenamartin.com?), and spur of the moment start-ups that will fail in the next day.

I definitely need an intuitive and fast web interface, easy setup for SSL certificates (for security enabled sites), and… well, that seems to ba about it.

In related news, Zoom Bikes now has changed the site format to a blog.  The site still needs to have a custom template fleshed out but there are some neat things posted (and quite a few things that are regurgitated from this site.

Alaska HD TV

Originally uploaded by zieak

Today I was interviewed by the guys behind alaskahdtv.com. They were coming through town from Wrangell to LeConte. They are thinking of giving SEAtrails a plug on one of their productions so gave me a few minutes to promote the system.

I showed them around town a little but we only had two hours so barely scratched the surface. Hopefully they’ll be back for a longer visit next time.

I had to buy a few parts for one of my DJ lights.  $8 total in parts.  They only ship UPS.  The bill to ship them up here was going to be over $40.  These two parts can fit in a padded envelope. I swear, i could make a small fortune doing freight forwarding in Seattle to Southeast Alaska.  Just take the package and put it in the mail.  So i had them mailed to Kevin (they are being mailed from Los Angeles to his address near Los Angeles).  Here’s the final amount.

I’ve moved my web projects around to a few different hosts.  It isn’t just about finding cheap web hosting. You also need to worry about uptime, features you might use (my last shift was made because i wanted to do more with PHP) and convenience. You also might need to worry about bandwidth limitations, storage space, email, sql and other perks.

I love that my current host uploads things like WordPress that make me able to update my installation with just a click.  I don’t have to download and upload and backup and all that.  It does make me a little lazy but that’s what computers do right?  They make things easier.  Computer use wouldn’t have exploded if we were all using DOS.  If web browsing was still just text based i would probably still need TV for entertainment.

I have come to not even read my writing most of the time – I just scan for some red squiggly underlines.  I digress.  I love that my current host has “green” servers.  They buy carbon credits to offset their CO2 contributions.  I think there is a whole world of profit to me made in that realm.

I have a few sites that i’ve been working on… I should unveil them shortly.