BlueCapra – Page 17

The Hunter

May 2, 2013 by Alan R Leave a Comment

Below is a short story I wrote in high school. I came across it recently and decided to share it. It is the same story (with 2-3 word changes) that was written all those many years ago. Let me know what you think

The Hunter

The air was clean, the mountains were beautiful, and the smell of the wild flowers could tame the wildest of animals. Walking to the clear, cool water of a nearby lake, the hunter prepared to fill his water bottles. He hears an eagle cry as it flies through the air. Relaxing, he looks at the beauty of his surroundings and prepares for the hunt.

He walks over to his quarter horse and checks the saddle. As he begins to tighten it, he hears a sound. Wondering what had made the sound but thinking more of the hunt, he dismissed it as the wind and went to check his small string of sixteenth horses. The hunter thinks to himself and smiles about his decision not to bring the thirty-second horses (they’re just too small). [Read more…]

The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google – Week 66

April 29, 2013 by Alan R Leave a Comment

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 66th update for my attempt to rank first for my name, Alan Reeves. If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 65th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 4-28-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#10 – My About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture – back on the first page!!! (up 5 places from last week at #15)
#14 – My Twitter handle, @AlanReeves with picture (up 2 places from last week at #16)
#19 – Week 61 in this series (up 11 places from last week at #30)
#27 – My videos on Vimeo (up 19 places from last week at #46)
#54 – @BookWormLaser on Twitter (up 5 places from last week at #59)

This week I’m at #12. Overall, my top 5 results increased 42 places with 3 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 8 times in the top 100 search results.

[Read more…]

Get more accurate results from your heat maps

April 25, 2013 by Alan R Leave a Comment

Get more accurate results from your heat maps - heat map example Heat maps are a great way to test how a visitor interacts with your website. Face it, you don’t really know how someone uses your page. Sure, you may think you do but how do you really know. You don’t… unless you use a heat map.

A heat map is a graphical overlay of your website that when viewed, will show you where people clicked, how much time they spent looking at one screen (scrollmap), the site where the visitor came from, plus more. There are several services that offer heat maps but the one I use is CrazyEgg.

CrazyEgg has a simple interface and provide great data. For sites with a lot of traffic, this data is amazing. If you are not lucky enough to have a lot of traffic, you results can be skewed. Here’s what I mean; every time you visit your site, unless you exclude your visit visit, your have added a small bit of useless data. So, every time you go to your home page and check the tweaks you just made, you could be counted as a visit.

Most analytics programs and plugins have the option to exclude tracking for logged in users. This works great for Google Analytics (which I use) but is lacking in the CrazyEgg plugin. As a dedicated code geek and WordPress tweaker, I had to see if I could change that. With just a few extra lines of PHP code, you can too. [Read more…]

The Search for Alan Reeves – 1st on Google – Week 65

April 22, 2013 by Alan R Leave a Comment

Welcome back to my journey to being 1st on Google.This is the 65th update for my attempt to rank first for my name, Alan Reeves. If you missed the any of the posts, you can find the first one here, 64th Week update here (last week), and the ones in between on my Project page. Below are the results as of Sunday, 4-21-13 (click here to do your own search for Alan Reeves on Google):

#15 – My About page on BlueCapra.com, with picture (no change from last week at #13)
#16 – Week 61 in this series (up 11 places from last week at #27)
#30 – My videos on Vimeo (up 18 places from last week at #48)
#46 – Book Worm Laser & Design on Pinterest (up 3 places from last week at #49)
#59 – @BookWormLaser on Twitter (up 3 places from last week at #62)

This week I’m at #12. Overall, my top 5 results increased 35 places with 1 of the top 5 results occurring in the first 25 places. As a whole, I showed up 7 times in the top 100 search results.

[Read more…]

Get more reviews with QR codes

April 18, 2013 by Alan R Leave a Comment

Do you want more people talking about your business? Sure you do. Social proof, the things your customers say about you and your business, have a great impact on your success. There are an estimated 225 million smart phone users in the US (according to BusinessInsider.com). With that many devices in the market, why not use the technology to your advantage.

To a small business, social proof such as reviews and comments can mean the difference between growing and closing up shop. You can encourage customers to leave reviews but unless the process is easy, most customer will give up before finishing.

To make the act of leaving you and your business a review as easy as possible, you should provide easy links to the different review sites. URL shortening services such as Bit.ly, Goo.gl, and TinyURL.com gives you the ability to take a really long web address and shorten it something more manageable and easier to remember. For those customers with smart phones, QR codes can make the process of leaving a review even easiser.

QR codes are those strange, square graphics that have started to pop up in advertisement and around town. They help transform printed information into digital information. Just like the bar codes on the products you buy, the encoded information in QR codes is translated into digital information when scanned. This information can be plain text, contact information, a phone number for a quick call, a SMS or text message, plus many more. The information we’re interested in today is a URL or web address. [Read more…]