Firefox

Opening multiple web pages at startup

Did you think it was only possible to have one web page open at start up? With Firefox there is an option to have multiple pages open at launch. You can now have Politico, CNN, & HouseNet greet you each morning. To turn this feature on in Firefox go to Options -> General. In the homepage field enter the web addresses separated by pipes. For example: http://www.cnn.com | http://www.politico.com | and so on.  Click Ok to save and next time you relaunch Firefox you will see all your tabs open.

Customizing your search with Smart Keywords

Firefox has a feature that enables you to perform searches within a webpage through the address bar. For example, this feature allows you to search for an “Apple Ipad” on Bestbuy.com without browsing to Bestbuy.com and then typing the search in their search bar. You simply have to type in bestbuy apple ipad into Firefox’s address bar.

To activate this feature and create a smart keyword, go to a website that has a Search field. Right-click in the search field and select “Add a Keyword for this search”. Create the bookmark for the site and your smart keyword is now enabled.

Bookmarking RSS feeds

If you have websites you frequent often, especially news websites,  RSS feed’s make staying updated easier. Creating an RSS bookmark will automatically update stories and headlines from that feed.

To create an RSS bookmark, right-click on the Firefox tool bar and select Customize. Drag & Drop the RSS logo (which looks like radio waves and has Subscribe underneath) onto the toolbar. Go to a website whose RSS feed you would like to subscribe to and select the RSS feed button that is now on your toolbar. Now enter a name for the RSS feed and click Add.  You will see it has been added to your toolbar and will update as new posts are made on that website.

Multiple pages at startup

Google Chrome also allows multiple pages to open during startup. Chrome makes it super easy to set up. Select the wrench at the top right of the browser,  choose Options and under the Basic’s tab check the radio button that says “On startup…open the following pages”. On launch of the browser it will open the web pages in the order listed.

Pinning Tabs

If there’s a site or service you find yourself using often in a web session, you can pin a tab in Chrome. This feature shrink’s the window down to the size of the favicon (small logo that shows up in the left portion of the tab), enabling you to better multi-task with multiple tabs open in Chrome.

To enable this feature, right-click on the tab you want to pin and click “Pin tab.” To enlarge the tab, just right-click and click “Unpin tab” again to uncheck the option.

Calculations in Address Bar

Another cool feature of Google Chrome is its address bar can also be used to perform mathematical calculations with its basic calculator feature. You can type your math equation into the address bar and the answer will show up where you normally see auto-suggestions.

There are many, many more features in both Firefox and Chrome.  For more Firefox tips visit the Mozilla Tips Page.  For more Chrome tips check out Chrome Tricks the website dedicated to Chrom tips and tricks.

The answer is web statistics. Web statistics tell you detailed information about how many people are visiting your website, what they are viewing, and for how long. Web statistics contain data and graphs that might seem confusing. How do you know what data is important? What does the data mean?

This article covers how to interpret some important statistics from Urchin, Google’s web statistics software that you install on your own server. It is possible that your web host already has Urchin installed. The House of Representatives uses Urchin for statistics on many of their websites. While this article only covers Urchin,many of the terms are similar to those used with other web statistics monitors, such as Google’s Analytics, and AWstats.

The table below is the most basic summary of your web statistics. In Urchin, you can specify what dates you want to view statistics from. In this example, we have chosen a date range to display statistics for 2009.

Terms and Definitions:

Hit – Any time anyone loads one item up from your webpage it counts as a hit. The main page of a website has a items on it that when viewed as part of the whole page count as a hit. For instance, each image counts as 1 hit when loaded, so if you have 20 images on one page that will add 20 hits to your total when someone views that page. Hits do not provide much information as far as how many people are viewing a website. Focus should be more on pageviews and sessions. In the sample table below, the website had 8,000,000 total hits in 2009.

Pageview – A pageview is counted any time anyone views an individual page. For example, if John Doe went to a website and looked at the main page, the about page, and the contact page that would count as 3 pageviews. In 2009 the website in the sample table below had 1,500,000 total pageviews.

Session – Sessions shows how many individual visits you get to your webpage as a whole. For example, if John Doe went to a website and looked at the main page, the about page, and the contact page that would count as 1 session. If Jane Smith went to a website and only looked at the main page, that would still count as 1 session, and the website would have a total of 2 sessions. The website in the sample table below had 400,000 total individual visits in 2009.

The next section tells you how many hits, pageviews, and sessions you had per day. The sessions per day is the most important one to look at here because it tells you how many people per average day visit your website. In 2009 the website in the sample table below had 1096 people visit your website per day.

Average pageviews per session is also an important statistic. It tells you that in 2009 when a person visited the webpage in the sample table below, they usually looked at about 4 different pages. If the number is too high, that might mean that your webpage was hard to navigate and people were having difficulty finding the pages they wanted.

Average length per session tells you how long the average person spent looking at your webpage. In 2009, the average person spent about 20 minutes looking at the sample website.

The Requested Pages graph shows what the most popular pages are on a website. The main page is usually popular page on your website, and is usually identified as index.html or index.shtml. It may also be identified by a containing folder separated by slashes. For example if your blog was the most popular page on your website and it was in a folder called “blog” it would appear as “/blog”.

The RSS feed is commonly a popular page as well. This means that many people subscribed to your RSS feed in 2009. (If you aren’t familiar with RSS feeds, this is an entirely different subject. If you are curious, we have a blog entry about it here)

Remember that this list only shows the top 10 pages viewed. It does not mean that other pages were not viewed in 2009.

The Downloads graph is similar to the Requested Pages graph, but instead of showing pages it is showing downloads. In other words, this graph tells you what PDFs and Word DOCs people are downloading the most. The “hit” for each download shows you how many times that file was downloaded.

Another interesting piece of information that Urchin provides is where your visitors are located, which Urchin displays visually in the map below:

The darker shades of green represent areas of the globe where more people have visited the sample website. The circles point out areas were large amounts of visitors are coming from. Notice in the sample that many visitors have come from the DC area.

For more detailed information on generating Urchin reports and interpreting more data, read the article from NewFangled.com, Analyzing Web Traffic.

There are other graphs and statistics on Urchin, but the ones we discussed are the most informative and easy to understand.