Should Arrows be Placed Before Link Text or After?

An interesting article at the Usability Post poses the question "Should Arrows be Placed Before Link Text or After?" I only tend to use arrows with previous / next links where I've always felt that the arrows should point away from the links but there are some interesting views from other people here too...

# Permalink Posted on Thu 30th October, 2008 in web design, usability and lsucs with no comments

Robots - To index or not to index?

I'm having a look around the site at the moment and trying to think what I can do to help search engines spider MilkHub better. After reading about sitemap files I've started creating my sitemap.xml and I'll be fleshing that out a bit over the next week or so and pinging that to the search enginges. What else can I do?

# Permalink Posted on Thu 25th September, 2008 in SEO, Google, sitemap, web design and lsucs with no comments

cURL Error 26: Failed to open/read local data from file/application

Last night I was battling against cURL Error 26: "Failed to open/read local data from file/application" and eventually found a very simple solution...

# Permalink Posted on Tue 26th August, 2008 in php, curl, error, web design, code and lsucs with 2 comments

The Survey 2008

Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.

# Permalink Posted on Thu 31st July, 2008 in web design with no comments

Tracking visitors with Google Analytics

Sorry to anyone who got a few old posts through from my blog last week. I've been playing with the Google Analytics code a bit and trying out new things, one of which is a way of tracking when people have come to my site after clicking a link in one of my feeds. I found an interesting article about campaign tagging which describes how to add extra query string parameters that Google Analytics will read and use to split up my statistics for me.

If you're adding my feed to an aggregator or a public listing please feel free to add a utm_source to the url so I can tell where people are coming from, as well as which type of feed they're coming from; I will pass through the utm_source to the links in the feed. For example, I've got this in the facebook importer: http://www.milk-hub.net/blog/feed?utm_source=facebook.

Next step is to track when people read the articles.

# Permalink Posted on Mon 9th June, 2008 in lsucs, Google, Analytics and Site Updates with 5 comments