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Category: web

Top 5 wp-plugins to improve your bounce-rate

Published January 18, 2008 by lievenlb

The bounce rate indicates how many web-visitors leave the site without visiting any other pages before a certain session timeout elapses. That is :

High bounce rate means the site must be horrible to site visitors and most likely they would never return again. They are not even interested to check other content of the site. First impression counts.

After installing google analytics some weeks ago, I noticed a worrying high bounce rate : close to 80%… At first I thought this was due to the fact that all iTouch fans left the moment they saw a mathematical symbol, but further analysis proved me wrong : iTouch fans study posts here a lot longer than the average mathematician. But then, what was the reason? Is this site really so horrible to look at? is the content of such poor quality?

Anyway, I’ve tried out a couple of tricks, with surprising effect. The bounce rate dropped from 80% to under 3% and best of all, it appears to stay that low. Here, the google-analytics bounce-rate evolution of the last 3 weeks

So, what kind of magic voodoo did I perform on january 6th? I’ve installed a couple of WordPress Plugins and changed the upper part of the entry-page. My basic assumption is that people leave a site when they come to it for specific information (for example via a search engine), do not find the info immediately and don’t want to spend too much time looking for it. So, I wanted to have all tools to find content on this site right in front of the potential new-comer. Here are the 5 major changes to the header part and the plugins Ive used.

1 : Rather than having a monthly-archive in the sidebar providing no more info than the number of posts in a particular month, create a proper archive page where visitors can find the titles and links to all posts in reverse chronological ordering. I did use the Smart Archives Plugin.

2 : Even better : have a drop-down archive right under the header-picture so that visitors can scroll down the list of all posts without having to load another page. Ive used the Awsom Archive Plugin.

3 : Let visitors see in a glance what your blog is all about by having a tag cloud under the header. I didnt feel like tagging 300 old posts, so I used the Simple Tags Plugin to do it all for me.

4 : Have a welcome message near the top to aid new visitors (especially when you have, like me, 77.51% of them around). The message disappears after their third visit. It’s a wonderful idea, made possible by the What Would Seth Godin Do-Plugin.

5 : Write series of posts and have links to the other parts available at the top of the new post. Likely, people are going to check out the other parts for more information. Rather than hard-coding the links by hand, Ive used the In Series Plugin.

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quick iTouch links

Published January 16, 2008 by lievenlb

MacBookAir? Is this really the best Apple could come up with? A laptop you can slide under the door or put in an envelop? Yeez… Probably the hot-air-book is about as thick as an iTouch. The first thing I did was to buy a leather case to protect the vulnerable thing, making it as thick as a first generation iPod… (needless to say, when my MacBookPro breaks down, ill replace it with a MacBookAir, clearly!)

Ranting about MacWorlds : Wired has a great article on last year’s event. Steve Job’s iPhone presentation is something that will be part of the collective memory when it comes to 2007-recollections. Few people will have realized that the Apple-team didnt have a working prototype a few weeks before… Here’s The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry. A good read!

If you plug in your jailbroken iTouch, you will be asked wether you want to upgrade to 1.1.3, something we all feared for a long time and so it takes just nanoseconds to hit the cancel-button. But, there is good news! Rupert Gee reports that you can downgrade to 1.1.1 and redo jailbreak. I won’t try it for some time, but still…

In the unlikely event that you come here being a mathematician, here’s what I did with my iTouch today. Ive downloaded the Connes-Marcolli talks on Renormalization and Motives part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7 and part 8 at work. They are in mp4-format so you can load them into iTunes and onto your iTouch!!! Weather is not favorable for outdoor-cycling at the moment, so I used the home-trainer, put the iTouch in front of me and, boy, was I educated…

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Majority offers security…

Published January 15, 2008 by lievenlb

What better way to start a series on Web 2.0 & Mathematics than to reflect on the potential dangers of majority-approved sites, such as Google, Wikipedia and META-sites. Bee has written a great essay The Spirits That We Called

Now you can tell me everyone of us should be rational, we should always check sources, doubt unverified reports even if repeated several times. We shouldn’t believe what we read without questioning it. We should seek accuracy and not easy entertainment. We should, we should, we should. But face it, many people don’t. Because they just don’t have the time, or are not interested enough, and the most commonly used criteria in this case is to follow the masses. Read what others read (the posts with the most comments?) go where many people link to, talk what others talk about, pay attention to what many people consider relevant. Majority offers security, Wikipedia is trustworthy, Google has proved useful.

To wet your appetite to take a break, and start reading the full essay (11 printed pages available from this pdf link), her opening paragraph, in which she outlines possible consequences of tempering with social bookmark sites.

MARCH 13th 2008: Until Wednesday, the Presidential candidate [insert name here] scored high in the polls. Then a Google search for his name showed up as first hit a report on an alleged child abuse committed by the candidate, published by Mary S. (name changed) on her personal website. The story was backed up by the following highly ranked hits that indicated two similar events during his youth, though reliable sources were missing. Within less than one hour, the reports were echoed on thousands of weblogs, appeared on digg and reddit, the original websites received 200,000 hits within the first 6 hours, until the server crashed down. Immediate press releases by the candidate’s PR groups did not appear on the Google listing, and could only be accessed by secondary links. It took until the next day that printed newspapers could attempt to clarify the situation.

Another, equally interesting essay, to which Bee points is Digital Maoism by Jaron Lanier,

The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There’s a frantic race taking place online to become the most “Meta” site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites.
The race began innocently enough with the notion of creating directories of online destinations, such as the early incarnations of Yahoo. Then came AltaVista, where one could search using an inverted database of the content of the whole Web. Then came Google, which added page rank algorithms. Then came the blogs, which varied greatly in terms of quality and importance. This lead to Meta-blogs such as Boing Boing, run by identified humans, which served to aggregate blogs. In all of these formulations, real people were still in charge. An individual or individuals were presenting a personality and taking responsibility.
…
In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion.
…
In March, Kelly reviewed a variety of “Consensus Web filters” such as “Digg” and “Reddit” that assemble material every day from all the myriad of other aggregating sites. Such sites intend to be more Meta than the sites they aggregate. There is no person taking responsibility for what appears on them, only an algorithm. The hope seems to be that the most Meta site will become the mother of all bottlenecks and receive infinite funding.

Now, please print out these two essays, turn off your computer for an hour, and read them! Perhaps they change your opinion as to whether or not getting involved into some of these bookmark sites. Being aware of their potential danger is one (important) thing, neglecting them altogether has drawbacks too.

You might want to repeat the experiment I performed last night : type in your favorite technical term (mine was ‘noncommutative’, when this failed to return a hit, I tried ‘geometry’) into bookmark sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, MyBlogLog, Reddit, blinklist, Magnolia and a dozen other similar ones.

You will discover that there is hardly any mathematics of value to be found there. As more people are using such sites in search of information, an inevitable consequence is that mathematics will become even more marginal, unless we take some action.

In my experiment, there was one noteworthy exception (( delicious was another ok-site )) : CiteUlike which has 427 articles tagged noncommutative, perhaps a result of the action I started 2 years ago. So, there is still hope!

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