Google url shortener

Google has recently opened a new service: Google url shortener. This url shrinker service works like Bit.ly (we described it at the Setting up the blog entry), you can type an url and Google will create a shortcut for you. For example, I typed http://themunsonsapps.blogspot.com and I get http://goo.gl/HtWzn, passing from 35 chars to 20.

The great feature isn't the shortener itself at all, is the analytics service. Google tracks all the traffic of the shrunk url and displays all the stats in a graphicly by hour, day or month with the corresponding referrers. It also gives you information about the visitors profile, like country, browser and platform. It also has the QR Code feature for mobile phones, you can check it by appending ".qr" to the short link, like this: http://goo.gl/HtWzn.qr.
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Setting up the blog

The blog is actually on the "start up phase", it still needs a logo, a lot of contents, apps (some of them are developed and ready to be published) and the most important thing in every blog, visitors!

With this scope, I've researched in the webmaster's world and I've found some tips to get a more comfortable website for everyone. I've also found a general interest on the web about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techs. You should know that if your webpage is in the results of the search engines (such as google, yahoo or bing) queries, it will have more opportunities to get visitors. I describe below the methods and tools used at the moment here:

• The best way to introduce your website to everyone is to use the social networks. If you insert a link to your webpage into facebook or twitter, your website will be target of a larger amount of queries. You can also insert the link in the firm of your blog comments, forum posts or emails, but be careful, don't be spammer!
• Edit CSS. A great design is a great key to keep users. The CSS of the blog are now under construction, but you can see some android style details (remember, the droid is under license), they are hiddenly saying that this blog is about android without any word.
• I've registered the blog into Weblogs, a blog directory that shows feeds realtime. This is very useful to link you and to be target of related searches. Although every SEO has an own way to calculate the crawl your page, they often looks at the webpages that link you.
• The SEOs will find you if your rank is high (ok, I know, it's obvious, but keep it in mind). This is the really tough task to do. In the Pagerank site you'll find tips to get a better pagerank.
• There are some websites dedicated to get links, visitors and advertise you. I've used the spanish site tutop, that ranks the best registered websites.
• Bit.ly is an interesting website, it has analytics features, QR Code, short linking and URL customize if you register. You can enter your website URL and get a shorter link, like this: http://bit.ly/dOpjGU. This link gets you into the bit page, get stats and redirects you to the wanted website. You can see the Bit stats by adding a "+" to the short URL, like this: http://bit.ly/dOpjGU+ or see the QR Code by adding .qrcode to the URL, just like this:  http://bit.ly/dOpjGU.qrcode.
• Google feedburner allows you to analyze, optimize and manage your feeds. Feedburner also interacts perfectly with blogger. It also gives you an feeds buttons like RSS, google and more.
• Alexa is a website that gives you traffic metrics, search analytics, demographics, and more for websites. You should register your website to be tracked (and of course, get linked).
• Technorati is another big web directory that saves blogs by categories and ranks them. You should absolutely register here.
• I think that Google analytics needs no presentation, it's a very useful site to keep track of your visits, keywords, geographic zones. Here you can find some tips to add google analytics to your blogger page.
• To allow your visitors to bookmark and share your site in an easy and fast way, exists add this. You maybe think that there is no reason to add you, but it's useful. You can give customized buttons to share and bookmarks, such as facebook, buzz, email, twitter and more.

I hope that this tips can help you. If you know another tips to have a greater and comfortable site, please, share it here. I'll be some posts like this when I improve our blogging methods.

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The QR Code

The QR Code (Quick Response Code) is a code patented by Denso Wave, you probably already know it, but let us write something about it.

The QR Code can be seen as the upgrade of the traditional barcodes, since it's a two-dimensional code that can encode large amounts of data in a quicker way. Although this kind of encoding is done to any scanner device, we'll see the QR Codes often associated to mobile phones due to the ease to scan it with the phone camera and elaborate the code instantly. There is a general thought in the web that says: "If you want to talk with humans, use ASCII characters, but if you want to talk to mobile phones, use the QR Codes". Since we can be reached by everyone, we will include our Munson's QR Code.

In the web we can find a lot of tools to generate QR Codes from URLs, emails, phone numbers or simple text and other tools to read those codes. We've used Kaywa to generate the following QRCode (try it!):

QR Code of http://themunsonsapps.blogspot.com

Do you have some innovative idea about QR Codes?

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