Themeless Thursday: Random Jots

1) Analytics

Here's a graphic illustrating the number of visits this blog has received from July of 2009 through May of 2010. Sure, I could have waited a month to do this. But I also knew my mind was going to be elsewhere in a month. I started using Google Analytics 11 months ago. I like the information it provides me. Some of you may notice I cut off the Y-axis. Without the Y-axis I realize no one else will be able to compare their number of visits to mine. But I do find my temporary increase in visitors during the month of October 2009, as well as a more lasting increase after January 1 and April 1 of 2010 to be interesting, at least to me.

The top five most popular pages in the past 11 months (except for the main page):

1) Poetry: Lost Generation by Jonathan Reed
2) St. Louis Snow Event of 1982
3) Poetry: Copy-Change - Where I'm From - George Ella Lyon
4) St. Louis Post Dispatch Obituaries
5) St. Louis Post Dispatch Obituaries - and other area newspapers

The popularity of those two poems I posted in August and September of 2009 is what drove the increase in visits in October 2009. They were part of a "Poetry Friday" series I stopped in November. I'm glad the other three pages are historical/genealogical in nature.

I highly recommend Google Analytics for anyone interested in tracking how many people are visiting their blog/website, and why.

2) The TITLE attribute

Moultrie Creek Gazette has an HTML-centric post on how to use the TITLE attribute with the ACRONYM and ABBR tags. Some bloggers and website designers may be interested. I don't use the ACRONYM and ABBR tags much myself, as I like to define meanings parenthetically (like this). However, I use the TITLE attribute a lot. With the IMG tag.

In this code

<img src="filename.jpg" title="Mouseover text">

The TITLE attribute provides the text that appears when you move your mouse to bring the 'cursor' arrow over an image. Move the mouse over any image in this post to see what it looks like.

It's good to use the TITLE tag with images, as many screenreaders used by the blind will read the text, so the blind user will at least know what appears in the image.

UPDATE:  I received an email from someone having difficulty with this, and I realized that Blogger (and likely other software,too) creates some code for images that might look more confusing than the code I put above.   Here is the code for the photo below:

<img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiaTQaIvDA56lOO16B4cF3dZJCpcq_4XZx1ACS99BpFaWb1kphaNkj2JjTn8hj05C9PrqwqNjPmGAqL7visgy54X7VsQWJULnO3MUNqhD0iT2mvJbNUGFguF0h36PS3Bs6OhqGPrRV/s400/TurdaCanyon.jpg" title="A breathtaking image of Turda Canyon nearby Turda, Romania." width="300" />

The most important thing to remember is not to add any brackets, as I don't believe the order of the attributes matter.  As long as each attribute follows the AttributeName="AttibuteValue" format.  I tend to put the Title Attribute at or near the end of the list.

3) Another photo of Turda

Turda, Hungary (now Romania) is where my great great grandfather, Abraham Deutsch, lived. (I posted another photo I found of the area yesterday)

Turda Canyon (Photograph by CameliaTWU)

The idea for the title of this post came from GMSV (Good Morning Silicon Valley)