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Traffic Rank and Site Confusion at Alexa

A few months ago I came across Alexa Web Search for the very first time. Alexa not only offers the usual search engine features, but also additional site statistics dealing with traffic ranking. Naturally, I entered my own site into the rankings to see what I could find. Considering my site has been around for only six months I was impressed that I had a traffic rank under 300,000.

Considering that there are nearly 50 million sites presently on the Internet, a site ranking under half a million is pretty good in my book. I had heard that sites using the Drupal content management system ranked well with the various search engines so I was pleased I chose Drupal for my site. All and all, those first few moments visiting Alexa were spent patting myself on the back for a job well done.

Then to my surprise I noticed that although I had typed in cmsreport.com, Alexa displayed uly.net. Uly.net was a domain I had never heard of before visiting Alexa.com. Worse, it appears that uly.net may have been benefiting from the traffic my site receives.

Traffic Rank for uly.net: 218,200

Where do people go on uly.net?

  • cmsreport.com - 98%

Now some of you might be asking yourself, why do I really care how my site is ranked? I'd like to say, it really doesn't matter to me either since I do run this site for "fun". But, I have an ego. I do get a sense of pride for finally having a site where people actually show up and visit. Put it this way, when you host sites that rank above 2 million you feel somewhat rewarded to finally have a site with only six digits in its rank. More importantly, there is benefit to understanding how traffic rankings from sites such as Alexa, Google, and Technorati are being utilized.

Quoting IT: Newspapers not Breaking Out of the Box

"A huge part of the problem is that newspaper companies are still being run, mostly, by people from the print side -- and who, though they may attempt to understand interactive media and the needs and media habits of young people, aren't effective at moving their organizations in a radically different, and necessary, direction."

- Steve Outing, "Why Aren't Newspapers Breaking Out of the Box", Editor & Publisher, September 25, 2006

 

One step closer to Firefox 2.0

In case you missed the brief announcement, the second release candidate for Firefox 2.0 went public last Friday. The release notes for Firefox 2.0 RC2 are available at Mozilla.com while download links have been made available at Mozilla.org.

I've already written quite a bit about the new features in Firefox 2. If you are interested in reading my articles on Firefox 2 please check out the articles from the list below:

Fifth Anniversary for Plone Content Management System

Plone is celebrating their fifth anniversary this week. Plone is an open source content management system (CMS) built on the Python based Zope application server. The two people that are probably celebrating the most about Plone's success are its project leaders and founders, Alan Runyan (a US Texan) and Alexander Limi (a Norwegian).

The following are some talking points straight from about the positive accomplishments of the Plone open source project during the past five years. The talking points are straight from their fifth year anniversary announcement with only a little editing on my part. I realize that there are other open source projects that may have accomplished just as much as Plone during the past five years. However, this is Plone's time to shine. Also, this is rare occasion I get to promote a non-PHP Web application to our visitors here at CMS Report.

FCKeditor's Drupal Web Site

Drupal IconIn case you missed the news, the Website for FCKeditor is now using the Drupal content management system (CMS). FCKeditor is a HTML text editor with a WYSIWYG interface and is commonly utilized in Web-based applications. The following was posted at the FCKeditor site:

We're proud to announce that, from today, the FCKeditor web site is running over Drupal, one of the best Open Source CMSs out there. After a long research, Drupal has proved to be the best solution to handle our half a million page views monthly, with flexibility and reliability.

Daniel Glazman, Mozilla Composer, and Nvu's future

I have been sitting on this story for some time. Daniel Glazman has been writing a number of posts recently on a brand new project he's just starting. Daniel Glazman was involved in the development of the Netscape and Mozilla Composer (now called SeaMonkey) as well as the author of the Nvu Web authoring system. All these composers contain a WYSIWYG HTML editor and in many ways can be the considered the open source versions of Microsoft's Frontpage and Adobe's Dreamweaver.

BusinessWeek: McAfee and Symantec Confront Microsoft

This is an interesting debate. Is Microsoft really being a monopoly when it comes to securing and patching its own operating system? Shouldn't we expect to be able to buy a computer operating system that is secure so we don't need anti-virus software in the first place? It is interesting, the marketplace for consumer products that Microsoft inadvertently created is upset at Microsoft for reducing the need to buy third-party. So what, consumers should have a less secure operating system and be required to buy a third party anti-virus software? BusinessWeek reports: