This time around, Jesper has moved gears to provide a hosting for a popular distributed version control system named Mercurial. I haven’t started drinking the distributed version control kool-aid just yet, however it has been gaining a lot of attention lately via another open source product named Git, developed by Linus Torvalds - the creator of the Linux kernel.

The Mercurial hosting provided by Bitbucket comes in a few different flavours, one of which is free and allows up to 150Mb of storage. I really like the fact that they are not attempting to offer a completely free service, if they were - I suspect that it’d be under enormous pressure. The cost of using Bitbucket to host your Mercurial repositories is very reasonable, starting from $5/month and stepping up to $100/month which includes 25Gb of storage.

Bitbucket provides a very convenient interface for interacting with the Mercurial repositories. As with most web interfaces to source control management packages, you can browse through different repositories, see all of the changes flowing through them and compare them if you like. A couple features that simpler products don’t support that I like is that you can ‘follow’ a repository, create queues for patches related to a repository, download the repository at time x in zip, gz or bz2 formats and it provides an easy to understand visual linking between changesets.

If you are looking for Mercurial hosting, I would definitely investigate whether Bitbucket is a suitable candidate to store whatever you need versioned. The service certainly looks the goods and from what I’m reading online, it is getting really solid reviews already.

During this particular update, I happened to notice (not sure if it was there before) - however Sun are now bundling (optionally of course), Google Toolbar with the Java installer. I’m all for providing the automatic update, however I don’t believe they should be bundling additional software, optional or otherwise with an automatic update.

I have no issue if you just installed Java for the first time and you have chosen to install the additional software, however adding it into an update and having it enabled by default is just a little to slimy for my liking.

• an email address of a a valid Google Account
• first name
• surname
• access level (administrator/reporting)

It appears that you no longer need to provide the first name and surname information. Interestingly though, they have not been marked optional fields, they have been completely removed from the interface.

To my knowledge, the first name and surname information isn’t visible anywhere within Google Analytics (please correct me if I’ve just missed it). If it isn’t displayed or is in limited use, it’s possible Google realised that they were increasing the barrier of entry for no tangible benefit or that they were duplicating information already available within a Google Account.

One particular aspect of useful link text that I try to abide by at all times, is that the link text should be descriptive and should reflect the resource that it is linking to. As an example, if you’re linking to a web page about the Porsche 911 GT3 RS, then a useful link might be Porsche 911 GT3 RS.

A popular technology site, TechCrunch has various web real estates that it promotes at every opportunity - however I think of late they are going a little too far with their frivolous, slap happy linking. Recently, the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that California has secured the manufacturing plant from Tesla, bringing it back from New Mexico.

In the article on TechCrunch, they provide a number of links (link text and URI below):

• Tesla Motors, http://www.teslamotors.com/
• the Roadster model, http://www.crunchgear.com/tag/tesla/
• “Come with me if you want to live”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHV6OzHjWV8
• “Do it, do it now”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6ALySsPXt0

and my beef is with the second in the above list. When viewing that article, I expected that link to take me to the Roadster vehicle home page within the Tesla Motors site, instead if took me off to a completely useless page regarding Tesla Motors (the company) within their business information site CrunchGear.

I’m all for TechCrunch promoting their other web assets, however I’m confident that their readers would enjoy their site that much more if they’d find a more appropriate manner in which to promote CrunchGear instead of deceptively linking into that site.

When viewing the Australian Google News page today, I stumbed across something that I thought was quite funny. In a moment of algorithms acting badly, they had managed to associate an image of Pamela Anderson against a collapsed set of news items related to regional council mergers in the Northern Territory. Clicking on the Pamela Anderson photo took you to the appropriate story, so that part of the system was behaving correctly - just that she was being associated to Northern Territory council mergers wasn’t!

Attempting to visualise who, what and how much of a project is changing is quite complex as there are so many variables - however Michael Ogawa has built a project named code_swarm which does just that. Instead of providing tabular or static images to help visualise a projects changes, he has managed to animate it into something quite spectacular.

Following are five different code swarm visualisations of popular open source projects:

• Apache
• Django
• PostgreSQL
• Python
• SQLAlchemy

The amazing thing that a visualisation such as code_swarm provides, is to show just how many people actively participate in a given open source project, how much each of them participates and what sort of tasks they are normally performing on that project. As an example, comparing the number of different people in SQLAlchemy compared to Django isn’t a competition - Django is ahead by a mile, though compared to Apache, the others seem insignificant.

Toward the start of 2006, I signed up for an account with wordpress.com and for obvious reasons, I’ve never needed to use it. Not that long afterward, I used the API key that was provided with my wordpress.com to fight spam using Akismet.

Today I signed into Gravatar, a web service acquired by Automattic late in 2007 to check some settings and was presented with some information about upcoming changes to my existing account. Not having used my wordpress.com account actively, I had to go sifting through signup emails from two years ago; not unsurprisingly, my account still had the randomly generated password!

Within two minutes of finding my wordpress.com account information, I’d followed the prompts and merged/associated it with my existing Gravatar account. The way in which this is being handled is great, it’s a passive change that happens when you next sign in and if you do have an existing wordpress.com account - you can associate them together.

The best thing is now I have one less login to worry about and I can see all of my information for all Automattic assets in one place!

• Do nothing, simply owning them is sufficient
• Set them up, alias them so the site content is accessible via any of the variations
• Set them up and redirect the variations to the primary domain

This post is going to discuss the third option, as I have recently seen what I’d consider strange results in that space.

Setting The Scene

Imagine you sell Product A and you have a web site at http://producta.com. For three years http://producta.com has been used as the main web site, however in an exercise for brand consistency - you opt to move the web site to http://brandproducta.com.

The change of domain is handled using a temporary redirect and is successful. Soon after the move, http://producta.com is no longer visible in the search engines and has been replaced with http://brandproducta.com.

Weirdness

As a clean up exercise, I recently went through and updated the redirects on the domain variations (including http://producta.com) to use permanent (301) redirects. At the time, I didn’t think I’d see any changes in the search engine result pages, as http://producta.com hasn’t been in use for quite some time and all that was changing was a temporary (302) redirect into a permanent (301) redirect.

What has happened is that a brand+producta search term which would have returned http://brandproducta.com as the first listing, is now sharing that space with http://producta.com. Since that domain hasn’t been in use for such a long time, Google are using the results from DMOZ for the title and snippet.

Explanation

I’ve read through the information that Matt Cutts provided when he discussed 302 redirects back in January 2006. There is a lot of good information on that page and also the previously linked article about URL canonicalisation - however nothing that I felt described what I have outlined above.

What I think has happened is that the temporariness of the 302 redirect has kicked in. Google have been seeing the 302 redirect from http://producta.com into http://brandproducta.com for quite some time and have been checking it periodically since it was temporary. When something changed (hence temporary) - Google kicked back into gear and displayed the results from http://producta.com.

Since it is now showing a 301 permanently moved redirect, I suspect that within a short amount of time Google will remove the listing for http://producta.com and it’ll be replaced by http://brandproducta.com.

I’d love to hear from someone if they have a more comprehensive answer on the results I’ve seen.

Once the data from your sites has been analysed by Google Analytics, it is then possible to compare the following metrics against other sites:

• Visits
• Pageviews
• Pages/visit
• Average Time on Site
• Bounce Rate
• Percentage New Visits

Google Analytics allows the user to choose which one of a number of industry verticals to place their site into for comparison; telecommunications, travel, business and news are but just a few. This industry specific targeting allows for comparison against sites which are similar in theme - vitally important, as you wouldn’t want to compare the statistics of a heavily ecommerce driven site against that of a social networking site.

To make sure that the first two metrics above make sense to each site, Google Analytics automatically places a site into one of three categories based on the number of visits - small, medium or large. When viewing benchmarking data about a site, only the data from other sites within your size category are visible. As such, if you have a small but up and coming site - it isn’t possible to see what the market leader may potentially be doing.

So far, we can compare six simple but very useful metrics against similarly sized web sites within the same industry vertical, though specifying a vertical for comparison is completely optional. While very useful, having a better unerstanding of exactly what you’re comparing against would be handy. I’d personally like a little clarification on the following points:

• What is the boundary in visits per time period for small, medium & large?
• How long does a site need to sustain the number of visits per time period to officially be moved between size categories?
• If a site does move between categories, as a user - am I notified that it has happened?
• If I use a country specific domain, am I comparing only against sites of a similar size within the country specific domain name space or is it a global comparison? I find this point quite important, as users from different countries have different usage patterns.
• Does placing your site within a country via Google Webmasters have an impact on the previous point - in case you use a top level domain such as a .com/.net?
• How are sites placed into an industry vertical and is it possible to see what vertical a given site has been placed in? The latter part of that question is important, as if your site has been placed into the wrong sub-category list and as a user you are nominating a different category (which you feel is the correct one), it could be providing you a different skew of the results.

The benchmarking service from Google Analytics has only just been launched and is still marked beta. I expect as more people start sharing their information with Google, more and more questions will get raised, more will be answered and the product will continue to evolve as do most Google products.

The statistics had been pouring into Google Analytics and then around April 25, same time that Australia has a long weekend to celebrate ANZAC Day, the transactions going through the site started to drop. At first I didn’t think much of it, in the tourism industry it is common place to see lower periods of activity over a long weekend.

I continued to keep an eye on the transactions being reported and expected them to resume the next work day, however that didn’t happen. At this stage, I investigated the issue further to see what the actual figures were and my suspicion was confirmed - the transactions going through the site had dropped, however no where near the levels that the ecommerce functionality within Google Analytics was suggesting.

A fortnight has passed and I haven’t seen any noises about it online and then today when I logged into Google Analytics, the dashboard included a notice stating that analytics was delayed in processing data from 30th April to 5th May and that ecommerce data across that period was unable to be recovered. I’m pleased that the Google Analytics team have posted a notice about it, at least that confirms that it wasn’t something that we had done which inadvertently stopped us reporting the transactions into Google.

Two things:

1. The image above suggests that the outage began on the 27th April, not 30 April as Google suggested. Either the sudden drop was the lull of the long weekend or Google have reported the wrong date?
2. Why did it take a fortnight to post a notice about the unplanned outage? While I appreciate it wasn’t going to change anything, if I had of known that there was an outage in place - I wouldn’t have spent any time investigating the lull and just moved on.

^* For those that have an ecommerce site and aren’t utilising the ecommerce functionality within Google Analytics, I cannot impress on you how amazing this feature is; the insight it provides into the revenue that your site(s) generate is amazing.