In the last 45 days, I’ve been fortunate enough to have a report featured on Google Docs official blog. The report which is hosted on Google Docs (surprise!) also had links to my blog. Not long after, the question came up… “How many of these users actually signed up for the newsletter?”.

From Aweber, I can tell which page they signed up from because of a tracking code in the signup form. But it doesn’t tell me where those who signed up came from. Thankfully, the CrazyEgg tracking code was installed on the blog in the past and I got my answer.

A good number of Google Docs visitors did sign up. I blogged the results over at Alice’s blog along with some alternative services you can use to track what really happens on your blog. Go read the full story.

By the way, if you need more assistance to whip your blog up into shape, check

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Super quick note here. Last week, my friend Elizabeth invited me to talk about WP security on her podcast. The podcast is published. I urge you to go listen to it.

This came about since WP sites and blogs have been a target of some malicious hacks. Just visit the WP forums and seach for hacking or security you’ll see a bunch of threads.

Is it because WP is in the dumps? Personally I don’t think so. It’s because too many WP installations are set up ‘on the fly’ and not locked down. Kinda like leaving your house door open day and night. An open invitation for people to enter and ransack it.

Anyhow, I talked more about what can happen on an insecure installation with some suggestions what you can do. Here’s a link to a previous post I made (in case you missed it). It has resources detailing the things you can

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Take a look at your blog (or website) categories. What do you see? A handful of easy to understand and navigate categories or a tangled mess?

I’ve had this blog for a long time. 4 years to be exact and it has grown up with the blogging ‘industry’. Back then, I created a few categories and over the years this just grew and grew. So now, I am forced to ‘tame’ them. But the problem is, with so many posts, I didn’t want to wait until I have time to re-organize each post. So how do I quickly keep unwanted categories from displaying, so I can deal with them on my own time?

If you’re running WordPress, you’re so in luck because they made is super easy.

Step 1 

Log in as administrator, go to you Manage >> Categories to pull up a list of all your categories. Hover your mouse over the categories you want to remove.

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As promised, a few days ago, here’s a theme based off Kubrick. This was originally done for my husband’s blog. At that time, I didn’t have the time to code it up from scratch so I used Michael Heilemann’s fabulous theme as a basis.

No hidden code or crazy linking terms. Download here to by clicking on the screen shot.

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This has been a long time secret concern of mine. WordPress is such a popular platform and everyone (including yours truly) is using it as a content management system in addition to blogs. It is only a matter of time it becomes vulnerable to all kinds of attack - just like Windows.

photo credit:
mauren veras

Guess I’m not that paranoid because there has been quite a bit of hacking going on this year. As if that’s not enough, if you’re not careful, there are some really, really bad themes out there that steal your traffic and have hidden code in too.

What can you do? Well for one, if you are using free themes, check them if they are clean before using. If you don’t know if they are clean, ask someone who knows to check them out. By the way, did you know, I have some free themes too? Here’s one. I’ll post two more

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