Do you ever wonder how many people visit your Web site? We did. So we ran up a copy of Mach5 Analyzer.
This is a new program for analyzing Web traffic and it’s the best we’ve seen. Mach5 fits its name: It’s very fast. Within seconds we found out we average over a thousand visitors a day to our
site. We also get about 20,000 “”hits”” a day.
Here’s the distinction between visitors and hits: When you count “”visitors,”” that tallies the number of individuals who came to the site. “”Hits”” refers to the number of times the site was viewed. So, for example, a single visitor might go to a site many times to check different items. Other sites might link to yours, so visitors there could click in and out of your site and return to their starting point. Even if there were a hundred of those, they would still be counted as only one “”visitor”” because there was single site of origin.
If, like some businesses, more than one person is authorized to edit a site, Mach5 Analyzer records who made changes. The program classifies user traffic by the day and hour, how long users stayed, what operating system they used to log onto the site, what files were most popular for viewing, and much other detailed information.
Mach5 Analyzer is available from Mach5 Enterprises: www.mach5.com. The program comes in versions for $100 and $200 for Windows. There is a free trial version.
BOOM-BOX PRINTER
Epson’s new photo printer, PictureMate, looks a lot like a boom-box radio and CD player. It even has a fold-down carrying handle like a boom box. Nothing complicated here: There are slots for three sizes of digital camera cards. Plug one in and start printing.
What we really like about PictureMate is you don’t have to connect the printer to the computer to crop, enhance or print a stack of regular 4-by-6-inch glossy photos. This is the only size paper the printer uses, but it happens to also be the size people usually want. We’ve had problems printing this size with other photo printers and usually ended up wasting a lot of expensive paper.
Expense is an issue with any photo printer, of course, and here you know what it’s going to cost right from the start. The ink cartridge and paper come together in packs that sell for $29. You get 100 sheets of glossy photo paper in the package, so that works out to 29 cents a print. This is roughly the same as the price of having your pictures printed by a photo lab. But this way you can have the same quality for the same price at home, without the hassle of uploading your files to a Web site or taking your camera card to a camera shop.
The print quality is excellent, and Epson claims that the photos will last 200 years in a photo album. Price is $199 and you can get it at BestBuy (www.bestbuy.com) or www.mypicturemate.com.
ONE GRADUATE, ONE E-MAIL
About a gazillion kids are going to graduate from college this June, and when they do, many of them will lose their best friends — the ones they’re linked to through the campus e-mail system. A service called Graduate Mail offers a way to soften this loss by setting up a new e-mail account that is simply your name registered as an Internet domain.
You can do this on your own, but there are some benefits to doing it through the service. For $4 a month, Graduate Mail promises an e-mail address that stays the same all your life and links to other e-mail addresses you accumulate in the working world. The service screens out spam and, as a little bit of an “”old school tie”” kicker, sends part of the fee to your college’s alumni association.
Graduate Mail is $4 a month or $35 a year from www.graduatemail.com.
INTERNUTS
This is a real Internut. This guy create a Web site (www.j-walkblog.com/blog) just to puts things on his Web site that he finds interesting. And by golly, they are interesting. There’s the collection of 300 odd icons he’s found on other sites while browsing the Web. Also has links to anything on the Web that caught his fancy. For instance :
- www.coolproductz.com: How about a blender powered by a cordless drill? Make smoothies and shakes even if you didn’t bring your blender to the beach — as long as you have your electric drill. Doesn’t grab you? How about sticking a soda can on the side of your monitor? Needs a long straw, though.
- www.fakeisthenewreal.org: Maps of the world’s subway systems. Tells you where to get off. Moscow radiates, Paris clusters. Or, a hypothetical map of the United States if it were rearranged into 50 states with equal population. The states would then have about 5.6 million people each. Interesting map; click on Electoral College Reform.
- www.iwantoneofthose.com: Here you can get a set of cow stickers to make your refrigerator look like a Holstein cow, sort of. Oh boy. Lots of odd gift ideas on this site.
- www.thinkgeek.com: Hot hands might need a mouse with a built-in cooling fan. Find it here.
