[BlogSite.029] Human calendar added

Found this Human calendar from Annie's blog: A View on Design which is quite interesting - with photos of different people shown everyday.

Hope you like it!

[BlogSite.028] Home Sweet Home

I was away for a while, stayed in the sunny Los Angeles California for weeks, enjoying the beautiful sun shine and inexpensive food/shopping thanks to strong Aussie dollars.

Also visited some new display homes and found lots of interesting ideas which is quite different from what we have here in Australia. Will post some information to share with everyone later. It's really great to be back home again...

By the way, I decided to change my blog template back to the previous one, as the new template isn't wide enough.

[BlogSite.027] Style change

Thanks to The Browns's blog, I noticed this site called The Cutest Blog on the Block and decided to give their fancy background image a try - I have been in the same look and feel since April 2007!

Hope you like the new style...

[BlogSite.026] Yeah! I got 2 followers!

I just found this new feature in Blogger called "Following" which shows how many users subscribed to my blog using Google Reader. And I was surprised to find that I already have a few followers! I have also subscribed to quite a few blogs but unfortunately looks like this "Following" thing only counts those using Google Reader and I was mainly using Netvibes...

I have also added this new widget to show the followers at the left hand side bar, hope you can subscribe to my blog too!

[BlogSite.025] SiteMeter back online again?

Don't know what happened, but looks like after 2 days of down time SiteMeter is back online again.

Luckily my 10,500+ counter still there....

[BlogSite.024] Something wrong with SiteMeter??

I used Sitemeter to track the number of visitor for my site.
For some reason, since yesterday I am getting problem with their site, causing disruption to my blog.

I have removed the code and my blog is back to normal now.

[BlogSite.023] Start preparing for City2Surf 2008!

I decided to have my 2nd charity run for City2Surf this year, last year I raised $110.00 for "Youth off the street", details of my last run can be seen here.

My charity this year is "Starlight Children's Foundation", and hopefully I can raise some money for them as well.

There's only about 5 weeks left before the 10/8 run. Although I have been running for 2 weeks, I just setup this little "ticker" from tickerFactory.com on the left hand side banner, to remind me of my progress. I would like to have at least 30 runs in the next 5 weeks. Which means I will only allow 1 day off per week... That might not sound that cool, don't forget it's winter now in Australia and it's indeed quite cold at night...



Any way, the ticker starts from tomorrow, wish me good luck!

[BlogSite.022] New blogs

I have added 2 blogs "Building My First Home" and "House Building Diary" to my "Other Blogs" list. Both of them are also building with AllCastle, please visit their blogs and kindly provide some encouraging comments/feedback like you did for mine.

That's what we are here for, sharing our building experiences. Hopefully provide some help to others and "most importantly" put some pressure on the builders for better quality work!

Are you also building a house, interested about it, or planing to build? Start blogging and tell us your story!

[BlogSite.021] Added "ClustrMaps"

Added a small widget called "ClustrMaps" at the menu bar on the left hand side. This shows a small map of the world, showing where my visitors came from. Unfortunately have to start counting from zero and it only update once a day... Just for fun actually, Enjoy!

[BlogSite.020] Added "Snap Shots" and "BabelFish" to the site

Snap Shots
Just let you know that I have added this little widget called "Snap Shots" to the site. With this widget you can now move your mouse cursor on to any external links and it will automatically pre-load the site and show it in a small popup window for you to preview. You can then decide whether to click on it or not. I am testing the different options/settings, so please let me know if you have any suggestions/opinions.



BabelFish from AltaVista
I have also added "BableFish" from AltaVista to the navigation bar. You can now translate the page content into a few different languages. Have a try, it's quite interesting!

[BlogSite.019] Interesting "Referring URLs" from search engines

I mentioned in this post about sitemeter reports on 8/8. In the past few weeks, I found the "By Referrings" report the most interesting as it tells you where people came from.

From all those "Referring URLs" I am most interested in those from search engines. Which shows what your visitors were looking for when the search engines listed your site as one of the answers. So far I have found the following ones from Google and Yahoo:

• Search for "back yard excavation costs gosford" from www.google.com


• Search for "australia downlight fire" from www.google.co.uk


• Search for "building concepts with foam waffle pods" from www.google.com.au


• Search for "raked joint photo" from www.google.com


• Search for "keeping daily weather data" from www.google.com


• Search for "2007 model 2 storey house plan" from ph.search.yahoo.com


• Search for "house building from ground up" from uk.search.yahoo.com

If you have setup some report for your blog, you can check how did your visitors found your site as well. Have a look at the referrings URLs reports and search for URLs from search engines, you might get some interesting ones!

[BlogSite.018] Celebration for over 2,000 hits in 3 months!

On 26/6, we have our first celebration for getting 500 hits in first month.
On 27/7,we have our celebration for over 1,000 hits in 2 months (Note about another 500 hits for the second month, similar to first month).
Today, I am proud to announce that the number of hits in our third month has doubled, and we have now over 2,000 hits in 3 months!

Thanks again for the support!!

[BlogSite.017] New Label Type "Weekly Summary" Added

Currently with the "Progress" label, I can use it to report the progress of any activities. But when I think forward, it would be a bit messy to work out what had happened in week no.X after 3 months. That's why I decided to add this new label called "Weekly Summary", so that everyone can have a clear view of what happened each week.

Our official starting date is 2/8, and let's wait and how long it would take for the house to finish. It's a long journey, with little planning at the beginning would make the whole process easier to track and understand.

Cheers

[BlogSite.016] Our poll wasn't that popular/successful...

This is the result of my first poll, looks like it wasn't that popular or successful... Need to think of some other ways...

What improvements would you like to see on this blog?

[BlogSite.015] SiteMeter got reports as well!

May be you already aware of this, I just discovered this about half an hour ago...

I was talking about all those wonderful reports you can get from Google Analytics the other day on this post. About half an hour ago I accidentally clicked on the SiteMeter counter on my site and I found that it provides some reports as well!

Yes, all you have to do is click on that SiteMeter counter and it will bring you to a SiteMeter site with all the reports.

This has a totally different concept from Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you have to logon to their site to see those reports, therefore the reports are only available to the site owner/administrator. While the SiteMeter reports are available to all visitors. Well, there's no right or wrong with either option, just depend on how you feel which one is more suitable for you.

Again, I have included a few reports for your reference. First, the summary report.

This report shows the location of recent visitors.

This report shows the referrals.

This report is quite interesting, it predicts how much traffic you might get for the next hour/day/week/month based on the current figure. I think it's quite fancy but not much use.

This one shows number of visits by days.

This one shows visitor details, check if your ISP is listed here...

Finally as usual, you get a world map. I specifically used the Australian map. You can see that we actually have more visitors from QLD/VIC/TAS than NSW, that's interesting!

[BlogSite.014] Have you tried Google Analytics?

I have inserted Google Analytics code to my site on the same day as I started using the SiteMeter counter in end of May. As Google Analytics doesn't provide any visible counter, I simply forgotten about it.

I logged on to Google Analytic today for the first time since May and was surprised to find that it can provide so many reports, and it's free! With SiteMeter although it provides a counter, you won't get any report like this unless you upgrade to the fee paying version. I will post some of the reports here for your reference. Hope you find it interesting as well.

First the overview, it shows you the graph (Note: you have to change the time period, it defaults to 1/7 - 31/7 when I first started), number of unique visitors, number of visits, ...etc. Quite helpful.


Next is the "Loyalty" report, more than 50% only visited once or twice... Well, it's the Internet world, what sort of Loyalty are you expecting??


Next is the "Depth of visit". As expected, most people only look at the first page...


Next is the "New vs Returning" report, looks like we have quite a lot of happy visitors that are willing to come back.


Next the referring site shows where visitors came from. I found it quite interesting. Most of the users came from homeone.com.au. Got a few from bestbuilder and my city2surf page as well.


Finally, is the country one, quite interesting to see visitors from 33 countries in the world!


Yes, it got almost everything except the counter, but since it's providing a lot more valuable report than others, you can use the free counter from SiteMeter, but definitely add Google Analytics into your blog, highly recommended!

There are a lot more reports than those I described above. Have a try yourself, you will be surprised with the information you can collect!

[BlogSite.013] Help me to improve my blog!

Since last Thu, I have been spending about 2 hours every night training, preparing for next Sunday's City2Surf run. So I definitely won't be able to spend a lot of time on the blog until next Sunday, sorry about that!

During my cold daily run on the road, I have been thinking about the way this blog has been running and also looking at different ways to improve it.

In the past, I have been trying to cover detail information I learned from various areas, organise it and shared it on the blog. That seems to work quite well so far.

The fundraising run for City2Surf was another attempt, hopefully will get some support.

Next, I have created this poll and hopefully can collect some feedback from everyone. It will only take you a few seconds, but your feedback is very valuable to me, thanks a lot!

[BlogSite.012] Anonymous comments enabled

Anonymous Comments Enabled
I have turned on the settings to allow anonymous comments. You can now leave comments without logging on to Google.

Testing Google Poll
I was also testing the "poll" thing. Currently with Google Poll you can only add it to the left hand side as page element. I was thinking of adding a poll to the end of each post for user to vote how they feel about the content. Also checked a few sites providing similar feature, but not with easy settings as I expected. May be have to wait a bit longer.

Please let me know if you are aware of any sites providing this feature.

SiteMeter counter
Received a few messages asking about how to add SiteMeter counter to their blogs. It's quite easy, just create an account with www.sitemeter.com (it's free!), get the JavaScript code, and paste it to your blog template.

Give that a try, it's quite interesting watching the counter changes everyday!

I also added Google Analytics, but they don't provide any visible counter.

Email Contact
I have also added my email contact in case any one needs to get in touch with me.
building(dot)our(dot)first(dot)house(at)gmail(dot)com

[BlogSite.011] Celebration for over 1,000 visits in 2 months

Yeah! After last month's 500 visit record on 26/6, we now steadily passed the 1,000 mark. Thanks again for the support!

Tried to upload some firewords GIF images but for some reason they don't work properly, so I quickly removed them :-( ...

I am busy working on a "secret mission", hopefully will attract more visitors. I would like to double it to around 1,000 per month if possible... Can't tell you anything yet as I am still not 100% sure if it's going to work... Keep watching this space!

Cheers!

[BlogSite.010] New Label Type "Property Info" Added

Added new label type "Property Info" for all peoperty related news, articles, web sites and other information. Also adjusted all relevant posts used to be under "Others" label.