Basically, it offers a free service similar to that of Alexa,  Quantcast or Compete - of which the latter has been my primary indicator of competitor’s traffic. Neither one, however, including Google Trends is going to give you an accurate measure of traffic but for the most part they’d all give you a good comparison. Note that I’m referring to trends on “websites” not “searches” - which is also useful in it’s own regards.

I personally am going to prefer the use of Google Trends now, over Compete for traffic analysis, mainly because Google is the main source of traffic for most websites and would be a great way to measure the potential of websites you’re doing SEO work for.

One of the drawbacks of the new Google Trends service, unfortunately, leave new or low traffic websites drawing a blank with no data showed. Apparently there is some sort of threshold a website must reach before the allmighty “G” will spend resources to track it. Another is that you don’t really get much data, like search terms etc. for your competitors as with some of the other services, but again in my opinion it’s the most valuable indicator of search traffic - at least from Google.

One thing I really like is the “Also searched for” and “Also visited” data… once again this is very simple and very limited - but very accurate information based on the traffic levels Google delivers.  And something important to point out is that, if you sign into Google, you’ll see estimated traffic numbers on the Y axis of the graph… which seems to be about 70% of the actual unique visitors the handful of sites I checked actually receive.

One question that keeps coming to mind is… where does Google get this information? It’s no secret they track clickthroughs on their search results (the redirect link gives that away), but do they also get data from their famous Toolbar?

Overall, I like the tool very much. While the data is not as comprehensive as it’s competitors (discussed earlier), I believe what little is shown is very accurate (at least for comparisons) and a very valuable SEO tool if you know how to use it. I suppose it’s at least good for determining the traffic potential for niches you’re working on.

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I’ve tried everything I could… commas, colon, semicolon, plus signs etc… then tried searching Google, Yahoo, MSN… hell I even searched Ask.com to no avail. Well today I really needed to get this working, and eventually found a delimiter that worked - the “|” - which really doesn’t suprise me. I though I tried that before… maybe I had but used a space or something (you can’t).

So, at anyrate, maybe everybody knew but me… but in case you didn’t you can use multiple words for filtering Awstats results like this keyphrase1|keyphrase2

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First, if you don’t already have an ssh client (much more secure than using telnet), I recommend putty. It’s a free Windows utility. You can download putty.exe from here. Nothing to install, just run it as-is. Besides using it for this tutorial, you can also run useful commands like “service mysql restart”, “service httpd restart”, and “top” to name a few. At any rate, let’s get into the mysql optimization.

You can see / edit your mysql configuration file using pico, so open putty -> type in your web address -> enter your login name (probably “root”) -> enter password and you’re in. Before we go any farther, and assuming your mysql config file is located at etc/my.cnf, let’s make a backup. Type “cp /etc/my.cnf /etc/my.cnf.bak” (without the quotes) which simply makes a copy of that file in case something goes wrong (which can and will when you play with these kinds of files). To get to your mysql config file, type ”pico /etc/my.cnf”.  Here you’ll get a visual view of what’s in the file… yours likely will be a bit different.

Now, from here I’m not even going to begin to suggest what the best settings for your server / VPS might be… not only because I’m not an expert but also because every setup is different. Different memory and processor performance, your programs might be taxing your server differently, etc. But, this is why I wrote this - a great program I found written by Matthew Montgomery, called the MySQL Performance Tuning Primer Script and found here. Don’t bother downloading it to your computer, we’ll do it through ssh. Ps - before using the script make sure you mysql service had been running for at least 48 hours.

First, install it. While logged into your server through ssh, type “wget http://day32.com/MySQL/tuning-primer.sh” to download it, then “chmod u+x tuning-primer.sh” to set the proper permissions, and finally “./tuning-primer.sh” to run the program. The script will analyze your server and suggest the proper settings for settings such as Slow Query Log, Max Connections, Worker Threads, Key Buffer, Query Cache, Sort Buffer, Joins, Temp Tables, Table (Open & Definition) Cache, Table Locking, Table Scans (read_buffer), and Innodb Status.

Once you get your suggestions, exit out of the script back to the command prompt (ctrl X), then pico back into mysql’s config file “pico /etc/my.cnf” and change the settings accordingly. When finished, ctrl X back out and type “y” to save and overwrite the file (remember your backup!) You’ll need to restart mysql for the changes to take effect, so type “service mysql restart”, then I’d run a “top” command to watch the server loads… hopefully after things settle the load will be much better. Pay especial attention to the user “mysql” and how much CPU and memory it’s taking up.

I’d give it a couple days and run this optimizer again, remembering all you have to do now that it’s installed is type “./tuning-primer.sh” to run it. To close putty simple type “exit”. This is much easier then how I normally do it (playing with settings for days, watching changes work and not work - over and over), and likely better probably too. Happy optimizing!

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The answer was using RSS from one or the other, and even though Wordpress already has RSS functionality I’d prefer using the blog’s homepage in a static manner and keeping all the info in the phpBB forum. So, a quick search found a quick and dirty simple RSS mod that required no template edits, and am going to use Wordpress’s built in RSS functionality to display this in a blog template.

Regardless of where you generate the RSS feed from, the code to display it will be the same. Since Wordpress already handles imported RSS to display info in the admin panel, we can just tap into that code using a php includes and then use those functions to our liking. So, on any template page (outside of the loop of course), you can throw in this code which can be downloaded in this text file.

Some things to note, you must include the file rss-functions.php before you can use the RSS functions. Change the $url = to your feed url. The variable $href will output the post’s url from the feed, $title would output the post title, and $description would output the post. You can change the number of items feed with $i == 5 to whatever you want it to be. Enjoy.

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At any rate, I snapped a photo of Jacob, my 4 year old, holding my Llama .45 handgun (unloaded of coarse). He held the gun with me for a few rounds and wanted to showoff his pose for my cell camera… photoshopped it a bit for alittle more ‘flare’…

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