Tuesday, December 9, 2003

Wireless Google

The official Google Wireless User Guide explains how to access Google using a Mobile Phone or PDA (such as a Palm handheld or Organizer). Google also provides a nice HTML to WML auto-conversion feature when you access their site with a WAP cell phone.

Wireless Google by Philipp Lenssen

Google Referral Counter

Because I didn’t have the right tool so far, I wrote a small Google Referral Counter. It’s an ASP-based VBScript freeware which can be run on Windows IIS (I run it on a local server). It will check your log-files (e.g. Apache server statistics you can download via FTP if you’re a webmaster) and show you what people were searching for in Google to find your page, down to every last keyword and search phrase. (Mainly, the program goes through all hits in a log-file and outputs the HTTP-referrer string).

The tool is straight-forward and easy to work with. No special features like grouping are available, though you can filter the results to only display a certain keyword or URL.

Referrals to my Authorama Site

E.g. I extracted the following searches that brought visitors to my Authorama books site:

• from the movie a christmas carol what is bob cratchit’s street address?
• why aaron burr was so famous
• pictures of italian renaissance priest’s clothes
• What famous people lived in the middle ages?
• influence of buddhism in china
• true meaning of alice in wonderland

General Usage Functionality

Added to stats analysis, the program comes with a set of general usage functions wrapped in an ASP/ VBS class. They are:

• function getCurrentFile
• function getXml(byVal sPath)
• function getXmlString(byVal sXml)
• function getAttributeString(byRef element, byVal attributeName)
• function getAttributeStringDefault(byRef element, byVal attributeName, byVal sDefault)
• function getXmlError(byRef xmlDoc)
• sub setFileText(byVal relativePath, byVal fileText)
• function getFileText(byVal relativePath)
• sub appendText(byVal sPath, byVal sText)
• function getDictionaryFromParameters(byVal sParameters)
• function getClientLanguage
• function cutString(byVal s, byVal length)
• function toXml(byVal s)
• function fileExists(byVal sPath)
• function toUrl(byVal s)
• function specialPad(byVal s)
• sub objSorter(byRef arrArray)
• function isEmail(byVal s)
• function getTextBetween(byVal s, byVal sStart, byVal sEnd)
• function repeatedReplace(byVal sAll, byVal sFind, byVal sReplace)

For a more complete but still easy-to-use log-file analyzer, give 123LogAnalyzer a try. You can have a free trial for the program, which will then expire after a while. It will also show search engine referrers (not just Google, also Yahoo, MSN, and others) and top-ranked keywords/ phrases.

Google Referral Counter by Philipp Lenssen

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