RatCat Software

Software designed for kids that is fun and educational.

Posts Tagged wordpress

Updated our subscription options

Jun 12

Posted by Ted Moroz in Independent Software Development, Website Development | Comments off

Picture 4This morning I added Feedburner to our blog. This service from Google allows us to provide RSS and Email subscriptions of our updates.  This way, if my sister wants to read the blog via her Google reader, she’s covered, and if my Mom wants to see whats up, she can subscribe to the email notifications  and be notified when a new blog entry has been posted. Wordpress by default offers RSS feeds however Feedburner takes it to a whole new level. If you want to read more information about Feedburner it is available here on Feedburners site. Like the Google Analytics installed yesterday, Feedburner was very easy to setup and add to the site. You start by creating an account (which authenticates with a gmail account), adding your current feed url and shazam Feedburner creates a new url for you to begin using on your site immediately.

To make the feeds easy to sign up for I  also added a Wordpress plug-in called “Subscription Options” from a site called Digital Cortex.
This plug-in creates three buttons that link to each of the available feed options, RSS, Email and Twitter.

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Attempting to learn more about our sites visitors

Jun 11

Posted by Ted Moroz in Independent Software Development, Website Development | Comments off

Not sure why I didn’t know this right from the start, but it hit me like a bolt of lightening today… We need to understand who is viewing our web site and why. From what I can tell Google Analytics can help us learn more about where our visitors come from and what they do when they get here. This information will help drive future decisions on what we do with the blog, our product pages, and our youtube postings.
The process of setting up google was very simple and straight forward. You sign up for an account, they assign you a bit of java code to add to the head section of your html and your off and running. RatCat Software is using WordPress to maintain our site, so I first attempted to add this via a plug-in, which too is a very simple and easy to do. Well, it didn’t work as expected and although I only installed one plug-in (there are several to try), I quickly gave up and just added the code directly into the custom.php. Once the code snippet was in place, Google was able to recognize the page and our sites status changed to indicate that the tracking code has been detected on the home page of our website, and Google Analytics is aggregating the data to populate into your reports. So, starting today, we are hooked into the google analytic system and tomorrow we can begin to improve our online presence and strengthen our marketing efforts.

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