Pro Interneter

I have made my PHP eBook available for download. I’ve been getting a good amount of traffic from the search term “PHP eBook” so I thought it would be best for me to make it available now and to tweak it as time goes along.

The current version of the PHP eBook is a work in progress. It will teach you the very basics of PHP Programming - Variables, Forms, If/Else Statements, While Loops. There are 7 Lessons and each lesson has additional examples.

This eBook is something that I have been thinking about for a long time, and then I realized that you’ve got to get out there and make it happen. I am looking forward to getting user feedback and revising this eBook, so feel free to email me at Chris@ProInterneter.com if you have any questions or constructive ideas. I would also like to produce some additional PHP eBooks for more advanced users, so let me know what you think.

If you would like some information about where to host your website, check out my Web Hosting page where you can find out why I love Web Hosting by ICDSoft.

A few days ago I wrote about the Stumble Effect, which occurs when your website is submitted to StumbleUpon and you get a quick increase in visitors. Since then I have been on the StumbleUpon social scene, adding friends and messaging people. Today I submitted another one of my articles and saw an even larger increase in visitors. I am guessing the additional increase is due to the number of friends that I have added and my increased use of StumbleUpon. I’m still not totally sure how the whole system works, but it sent 319 new visitors to my blog today.

Here are some quick stats:
Visitors: 319
Pages/Visit: 1.77
Avg Time on Site: 1:38
Bounce Rate: 28.84%

Again, that’s a pretty good bounce rate considering that people are being randomly dropped into my website. That means that if 100 people click the StumbleUpon button and end up at my site, nearly 72% of them are clicking to at least one other page on my site.

It’s time to Fall Back 2007. Daylight Savings Time ends at 2am on Sunday, November 4th. This means that your clocks will go from 1:59am to 1:00am, and then continue from there. The end of Daylight Savings time means that the sun will be rising earlier and setting earlier each day. As winter comes along and the days get shorter, it is necessary to “Fall Back” to “standard time” so that the kids aren’t walking to school in the dark.

Probably my least favorite part of the winter months is the short days. After we fall back, it gets darker and darker - until springtime of course.

The Google PageRank has been going crazy all over the internet lately as people try to figure out what Google is doing, but for right now I have some good and interesting things to report.

This blog has a PageRank of 1. That is fine considering I haven’t spent any time in the last 6 weeks link building.

Another Blog that I started 5 weeks ago has a Google PageRank of 3. We’ll see if this holds, but it would be good validation for the link building work that I’ve done.

My Business site has a Google PageRank of 2, which I believe is down from 3. Could be due to the way I am linking other sites to that page.

Weenie Roast.net has a PageRank of 1 and has fallen out of the SERPs. I am puzzled by this. (has nothing to do with you clicking it in the Google Search Results).

Anyways, the SEO community is up in a roar right now because Google is slashing PageRank for people that display paid links, etc, so it could all change very quickly.

The other day I went to check my web statistics and noticed that one of my sites had experienced a rather large boost in that day’s traffic. This site usually gets 6 - 12 visits per day, but it had racked up 38 visits. Needless to say I was curious about what had happened. After poking around my Google Analytics for minute, I figured that StumbleUpon had caused the boost in web traffic. I had just been part of my first Stumble Effect.

At that point, I really wasn’t sure how StumbleUpon worked, and really I’m still not totally clear. Yesterday I woke up and was sad to see that my traffic had returned to normal levels, I decided to give StumbleUpon another whirl and see if I could get the Stumble Effect to work for me. Turns out you have to download the StumbleUpon browser bar, and things start to make a lot more sense. You can click the “Stumble” button and it takes you to sites that other people have liked. Then you vote Yes or No for the site, and it gives you more targeted sites that you will like.

The good stuff happens when you start recording pages and then other people get directed to them. I went to one of my most popular posts and added it to my list. I checked back a few hours later and I had over 90 visitors that had been directed by StumbleUpon. By the end of the day the Stumble Effect had sent 95 visitors to my site. Here’s the statistics for an average visitors from StumbleUpon:
Pages/Visit: 1.98
Avg Time on Site: 1:31
Bounce Rate: 29%

Of course these are all open to interpretation. The Bounce Rate seems the best indicator in this instance. That means that of the people who were directed to the specific post that I submitted to StumbleUpon, 29% did not click to another page on my site - meaning that 71% did click to another page on my site. The Average Time on Site is often hard to interpret because they could click to the homepage and spend 10 minutes reading all the posts there, but it would only register the time from their last click - so if they clicked to the homepage at 1:30, and then went to another site after reading the homepage for ten minutes, it would register their visit as 1:30.

In the end, I wasn’t prepared for this Stumble Effect. I tried to add additional “Grab my RSS Feed” links, but I was too late. Most of the Stumble Effect happens within a one hour time frame, so by the time I added my additional links, the Stumble Effect was over. I don’t have any additional RSS subscribers today. Also, the reach of your Stumble Effect is based on how many “Friends” you have on the site - so I’ve got to start making nice and shaking hands.