Introducing Fueltweet, a new Twitter application you can talk to, it’ll tell you the best Petrol or Diesel price in your area.
If you want to know the cheapest spot to fill up in Bishopstown forexample, tweet “@petroltweet Bishopstown” or “@dieseltweet Bishopstown” depending on wether you are looking for Petrol or Diesel prices. It will respond to you a few seconds later with the most up to date and best price it knows in that area.
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The Marketing Institute, eConsultancy, Mailer Mailer and more are all great sources for email marketing reports and metrics.
There’s no substitute though for real data from a business’s own email marketing campaigns.
Campaign Monitor is a very popular and well-liked email marketing application. It’s cost effective too at 5 US Dollars per campaign + 1 Cent per recipient.
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More than once I’ve tried to be more productive during a working day by limiting the times of the day that I check and respond to emails. I first came across this idea in the book The 4 hour work week and again in Do it Tomorrow.
I’ve tried working with having only certain times of the day when I check my email. It works for a day or so but I usually fail to keep going for any number of reasons such as meetings, phone calls (because I didn’t respond to an email) or even my own habit of opening up my mail without even thinking.
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I’ve created my first ever API. I often work with and develop applications around APIs from other providers such as the Twitter API or one of the many APIs provided by Google but this is my first time creating an API that others can use.
Built using CodeIgniter, the API has a simple purpose, to take in a browser agent id string and return whether it thinks the browser agent is a bot or a regular web browser such as Internet Explorer being used by a person browsing the web.
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A few months ago I wrote a script to monitor the links on a webpage that users are clicking on to leave the page.
The script is a combination of; CSS to label the links to be tracked, Javascript to trigger the code when the link is clicked and finally PHP to store the time, current page, destination page, browser agent and IP address of the user.
The links use a Class within the link to label the links to monitor and doesn’t change the link itself, retaining any referral address.
I wanted to test this out over time and give it an easy page to work with rather than putting it on to the blog straight away to monitor the links there.
I put the script on my own Murrion Software homepage which is a simple screen showing a logo and 3 links. This links go to this blog, a ‘tools’ page containing other free tools and scripts and also to a ‘contact’ page.
Here are the (rounded) percentages of clicks each button received from August to October inclusive.
‘Tools’ link : 41%
‘Blog’ link : 31%
‘Contact’ link : 17%
10% left the page without clicking any link.
It’s not quite a heat-map but it’s interesting to see. I’ve swapped around the buttons now to see if their position has any influence on clicks over the next 3 months. I imagine there will be little or no difference.
