I thought I’d add a chat client and forum to the blog and checked to see what the hosting company provide and it was a bit underwhelming.

I tried and found both and neither worked very well and they looked hopeless. Very basic CGI. So I’ll have a hunt around for some jazzy javascript versions. It would be good if I could get some Ajax stuff working too.

I’ve been listening to some blog marketing podcasts and oddly, bearing in mind the guy is into marketing, the presentation was hopeless. He uses Talkshoe to record them and by the sound of it phones the podcast in as the sound quality is so bad. He really is just chatting to people and we the podcast listeners are just listening to a phone conversation. There are periods of silence, coughs, splutters, technical glitches. You name it, it’s on there.

But the content is terrific. I listened to the first cast last week and then did nothing but listen to all of the rest he had recorded. Then I listened to the whole lot a second time. Coughs and all. He certainly has great ideas on marketing and how to promote your blog. Other ideas were to advertise yourself on www.craiglist.org and Twitterific. Also he mentioned a ping engine called www.ping.in which pings 20-30 blog search engines, though only about 40% were successfull. That got me searching for other ping engines and I found several. According to the statistics (Not that word again. Ed) I was pinged, from all of the engines, at least 100 times, though I’m not convinced they showed up on the various stats tools I use.

I’m still trying to make some sense of the Google Analytics stats. I have a feeling that if tried to rationalise the statistics displayed by Google Anlytics, those provided by the hosting company from their own raw log files and the stats displayed on Deep Log Analyser I would go beserk. So I won’t. Instead I’ll just use them as a rough guide. This will allow me to say with great authority ‘yesterday I had between 300 and 500 hits and may have had 700 blog entries read’.

Just checked my Sitemeter stats for today (13:00 GMT) and their count of visits to this site has missed at least 80% of the hits. Worse still, I have just had a look at the Sitemeter who’s on page, who is currently viewing the blog, and it says there have been no visits for the last 20 minutes. I also checked this page 20 minutes ago with the same result. If I look at my blog log file, which registers all visits, including spiders and feeds as well as normal visits I can see a lot of activity. Am I paying per month for this the more professional version of Sitemeter. Why do Ibeat myself up with this garbage. The staff at Sitemeter can justify these lousy stats, but I betcha they don’t use their own product to accumulate visits to the Sitemeter site.

Test Director questions

I look in the SQAForums every now and again. They have numerous threads on different subject of testing. When you look at many of the questions posed it is pretty obvious that a lot of the posters have absolutely no software testing experience at all and ask questions so wide that they need a complete brain dump on the subject to answer the question. There was one question either in the interview questions thread or the Test Director thread where somebody wanted to know answers to a TD interview. Sounded like he was going to an interview at a company which used TD and he wanted answers to any possible questions. Didn’t he have any knowledge of the product? Has he never used TD? If not then why were this company interested in interviewing him? Maybe they had just bought the TD product and wanted to hire people with TD experience. Sounds more like the blind leading the blind to me. Shudder.

Oh to be a fly on the wall at that interview.