Google and Heroes.

A quick plug before I get to the meat and bones of this post. Mr. O Connor has a couple of new videos of him singing on his myspace He also has an single launch the end of next month 21st april in Sligo..

So onto the Google goodness. First off the Blogger site has had a bit of a facelift, customising your page with rss feeds and the layout elements you fancy is a piece of cake now. Also gone is the dreaded "Publishing..." delay. My one complaint is that the preview, while nice and fast isn't giving me a true view of what my layout is going to be.

For example, this line when I view it in the preview all fits onto one line.
As you can hopefully see thats not the case when its published.
Not hard to get around, I'm simply using <P> and </P> to handle
my line formatting now..

The other google tool I've started using (having applied for a free account and recieved it ages ago) is Google Analytics, basically its webstats for your website. And in typically google fashion its everything you want from a webstat service and then some. Its pretty hardcore your basic dashboard offering you a view customised for executive ( pretty colours and nice graphs), webmaster( browsers your visitors are using, javascript/flash/java compatibility) how many visitors 'bounce' arrive at your page and immediately leave and Marketer (keyword analysis, adword clicks and other 'evil' stuff).

Analytics lets me know that that the canadians are my biggest visitors (big shoutout to the canadians, I've always liked 'em) and search keywords that bring people here from google tend to be the names of actors and movies. y'know actors like Harrison Ford, Christian Bale, Kirsten Dunst,Maggie Gyllenhaal and movies like Casablanca, Requiem for a Dream and The Shawshank Redemption. ( Sorry that was mean, apologies if you just if you came here while searching for a movie starring Christian Bale and Maggie Gyllenhaal. There isn't one currently but you can always hang on for this this

The last thing I want to mention is Heroes. If you haven't heard about it here's the quick
rundown, Its a TV series about a group of people who start to manifest 'powers' flight, telepathy
and even manipulating the space-time continuum. I watched the first 7 episodes last night, and
its only brilliant. The use of the powers is kept very low key and the story, each character has their own very down to earth problems, takes center stage. Highly recommended, I put it right up there with battlestar.