Jianjun's Blog

Recently I found Google behaves strangely. It seems that there have been some inside changes going on.

First there were strange statistics in Analytics – I had three or four days’ visitor count fixed at 40!! That’s impossible. Later I realized that they’d changed the tracking code. Although you could still use the legacy one, you are advised to adopt the new code to experience some new features (if any).

I found Google started dropping my pages from its index. What a cool thing for a new blog! That explains the sharp drop of new visitors coming to my blog. Of course I’m not punished. If they punish me out of no reason, I’ll sue them in the Federal Court! Haha. A guy copied at least 4 web sites’ content and created dozens of satellite sites (on those free blog sites) linking to his main site got high rankings in every Chinese translation-related search. But such a spammer is not punished by Google.

Google webmaster tools tells me both my sites are not verified. That’s odd. They were verified a long time ago. So I uploaded again the verification files and added mega tags as Google required, but the webmaster tools returned:

Verification status: NOT VERIFIED
We were unable to verify your file due to a server timeout.

Er… This is not true. My site is running fine. I searched on the Internet and found similar problems by other guys during March. Considering all of the above strange things, I guess it’s Google’s problem, some technical glitch.

Thanks to Google, I wrote one more entry for my blog.

For those who still don’t know what Feedjit is: it’s a real-time traffic monitoring service. By putting a Feedjit widget on your blog, you will see live visitor information such as where the visitors came from, how they came and their landing page. The widget is highly customizable so you can personalize it to fit your blog’s color scheme. It works fine for a sidebar display, cute with all those small national/regional flags and clickable links to traffic sources. On the other hand, Feedjit also offers visitors an option to turn off the monitor, so next time around their information won’t be logged and show up again.

Due to the great popularity of the service, Feedjit recently (I noticed it since last Friday, March 7, 2008) seems to experience frequent technical difficulties. The space where visitor information is usually displayed often becomes empty and obviously some visitor information is not logged. Their home page put up a notice saying scheduled maintenance was underway from x time – y time. Then, after it came back for a few hours, it was down again with a similar notice.

As a fan of Feedjit, I hope they can solve the problem soon and continue their great service with even better stability. To get your own Feedjit code, simply visit their home page.

Multimedia content creation tool Sprout begins to offer templates to users.

Starting from scratch in Sprout has been a headache for many newbies who are not familiar with the beta system. Help is not always available and in some cases you have to search the Internet for tips. By using these templates, even a kid can quickly create a multimedia flash mini site in minutes.

All templates come with a fixed size of 300 x 250. Currently, there are two personal Sprout themes and two political themes – men, women; democrat, republican. I don’t really care about the political themes, so let me tell you what you can do with a personal Sprout:

Basically it’s a mini flash site with five preset pages – Home, Gallery, About, Video and Blog. These page titles are quite self-explanatory. With them, you can create a slide show, introduce yourself, add a video and a blog feed – not so impressive for an advanced user – but for new guys, these things can help them get started as soon as they signed up!

However, to get the most out of them, users need to spend some time dissecting the templates. This way you learn basic techniques quickly and soon you’ll be able to create your own desired effects from a blank template.

Enjoy!