This Google Analytics thingy

..has me excited and I cannot wait till the weekend to write a little about it. Might be an old hat for the tech savvy among you, but this free Google service adds ability to track visits to my blog with far more capabilities than the default out-of-the-box Blogger settings (dashboard --> stats). Screenshot below is from the Blogger Stats page -

Its quite interesting to know Reader demographics for your Blog. For me, inquisitiveness is one primary reason; but, in the long run I view this ability as a means to identify the reading interests of my audience and also to get more visits. Right now I am not generating too much traffic and it's just been 1 day since I have Analytics monitoring my Blog.

The features seem to be interesting. One of them being the ability to track page visits by City/State within a country. May not be accurate (the one from Calcutta, is actually the ISP location of a reader in Guwahati) but it gives a very close approximation. Those Sunnyvale and San Jose visitors would be me, trying to generate traffic for researching on Analytics. I hope to be able to suppress these counts very soon as can be done with the OOTB Blogger Stats. Analytics also tells me about my traffic sources (which mostly are from FaceBook now). I'll soon be exploring the rest of the features as well and be writing about them.

To have this ability for your Blogger.com blog, you need to insert the Google Anaytics tracking code into the Blog template (Dashboard --> Design --> Edit HTML). It's a good idea to take a backup of your current template in case you do not want to lose any customizations you have already done. There are several articles on the web which tells you how to do it (here is one) and I am not going to repeat them here. Once done, give it 24 hours to start showing your first statistics. For any help with the code, let me know in the Comments section, and I am happy to assist.

Will wind up here today. Gotcha go back to work. Keep reading and have a good day ahead..!!

P.S. I hit upon this idea, looking at some Analytics screenshots of a fellow Buzzer. This dude is doing some really kewl shit in his Blog and Buzz stream. :)

The week ends

It's almost dusk here now and the week will soon be over. And even before the weekend is over, the official work would start in the form of calls and discussions with my counterparts in India. Quite an event-less weekend this was. I whiled away most of my time with some meaningless surfing on the web. At other times I had the usual household chores to attend to and then spent an hour studying. Spoke to a few friends over the phone and chat and spoke to the Family. But then, most of my weekends are spent pretty much the same way.


The week was surprisingly better though. Besides the routine affair of work, a couple of good news came my way. This got me planning for the year ahead. So, some of my weekend time was also spent with some reasonable thoughts going in that direction. I am tempted time and again to put all my faith on fate to take me towards what I'd like to call a successful career. So much for wishful thinking. I guess I need to do more than just rely on fate for the kind of success I yearn for. It's been really long since I have worked hard enough - toiled like the way we did before our exams. The fear of the sword hanging up there sure does bring out the best in you.

The rest was all the usual that happens in a normal home-office-home routine. Getting plenty of sleep these days owing to the lazy ass that I have become. Skipped the treadmill runs for 3 days. That puts me back by 19 miles in my goal for the month and a couple of pounds (I hope not). But I collected a few good foot-tapping tracks I need for the work-out. Ate good food. Browsing the web was not that meaningless as it turned out - I prepared this surprisingly good spinach almond shake the other day. For a change, got rave reviews for something edible I prepared. This one's easily made and healthy too. No added sugars. Try it if you can. Went for X-Men: First Class and liked it. This was surprisingly much better than the previous one in the X-Men series. Also learned that the Wolverine DVD that I ended up watching was actually a leaked workprint of the movie. And all this while I was wondering why were the effects this crappy in the movie! It definitely took the fun out of watching the movie. Also need to catch up with the other movies I have missed out these past few weeks - Fast 5, Hangover 2; and waiting for Delhi Belly. And yup, I ate up that smiley faced orange sitting on my desk.


That sums up my past week. Dinner invitation is at a friend's place. So that's one less thing to do at home tonight. I'd settle down now with some music. By the way, this MTV coke studio music thingy is good. A refreshing and a welcome change from the usual Bollywood numbers. Listen in to it.

Almost time for an upgrade, and a test drive

Two recent FLOSS announcements has me excited - maiden release of Mageia and the Beta3 version of Mandriva 2011. Means I have something new (nothing geeky, I assure you) to write about. It's about time I did some justice to the fact that I earn my livelihood from a related industry. Read on.

Would have loved to see Mandriva announcing a final 2011 version by now. But, considering the fact that it has recently been into too much of a turmoil, this nearer to stable release is more than welcome. For the uninitiated, Mandriva is a Linux distribution specializing in the desktop OS segment. It has also made some foray into the  corporate market providing server class solutions to a few medium and large organizations.

Mandriva Logo

Sales pitch aside, Mandriva has always been my distro of choice whenever I wanted Linux on my personal computer, from the days I started using one of it's earlier avatar, Mandrake 7.0. During those college days, besides the learning motive, Mandriva gave me a better looking option against the rather dull Windoze XP (and the duller 98). And then, unlike other distros of those days, it let me play MP3s, watch videos and could 'see' all the FAT32 partitions without much of the geeky mount magic. It got me hooked and I have remained faithful ever since. The reasons have remained pretty much the same over the years with a few minor geeky additions. Look and feel is one big factor influencing my choice of distros and I have preferred it's bluish look to the rather dull brownish default look of Ubuntu. A default brown setup somehow does not strike any chords with me, even to attempt any customization. How I wish Mandriva had a large and strong user base as Ubuntu. It's an easy to use, effective and great looking distro and that is why I spare no opportunity to let people know about it (noticed the Mandriva logo on this blog?).

Mageia, who? For those of you who never heard of Mandriva, I would understand it'd not be wrong to assume that this is the first time you are hearing of Mageia. Mageia, is also a Linux distribution, recently forked out from Mandriva.  

Logo design by Olivier Faurax

The often tumultuous financial situation of Mandriva, led some of its employees and loyal community members to fork out Mageia as an independent community-centered distro. Besides having it's root in Mandriva, this community driven nature is what makes Mageia appealing to me. I wish it luck and hope it fares better than Mandriva.

I am all set to download both these distros and install them on the very first opportunity I get. I'd give myself a couple of weeks to clear out a few priorities and make some space in my bloated laptop, before taking the plunge.

Be it Mageia, Mandriva or Ubuntu, or for that matter even Android, giving us, the users the ability to influence decisions and directions is what enthralls me the most about FLOSS (free/libre/open-source software), and Linux in particular. FLOSS, in fact is about letting people make their choices.

The new blog link

My very few audience would actually notice that I have recently changed the URL for my blog to moonlit-musings.blogspot. What it was prior to this, my new audience may never know and actually doesn't matter.

The blog title still remains the same - Musings. Blogger (the site) did not actually let me have my URL as musings.blogspot and so I settled for moonlit-musings.

The link name is partly inspired by the fact that all of these posts have come up in the dead of night. Not under the moonlight per se; I mean, I'd love to muse sitting under a tree on an open field and inspired by the moonlit surroundings. But for now I'd remove myself from thoughts of such opulence. I could try that some day when I figure out something more reasonable to write in my posts.

Speaking of the Moon, I feel a lot connected to this heavenly body. Connected, not the way some of my friends would quip about - "You have a heavenly body too". But, for some reasons it has always been inspiring and it feels good looking at it. And, my given name in অসমীয়া (Assamese), actually means phases of the Moon.
 
Well, this is it for another moonlit musing. Thanks for reading my blog and please do keep visiting.