First up was the fact that Google Analytics historically never had very good mobile support. Even once that was in place, I had to mess about with Google’s PHP code to add support for Opera Mini’s proxy servers.

Then, once I had the tracking code in place and was starting to get some nice stats – I noticed a piece of text that I should have seen before I started anything:

5M pageview cap per month for non AdWords advertisers.

Whoops – Dabr has a lot more pageviews than that!

AdWords is their service where you pay Google to show adverts that point to your site. Of course I’ve had to sign up to this (at an initial setup cost of £10) and there should begin to be a few Dabr adverts appearing on websites around the web. I’ve even started getting a few clicks.

Google charges me with every click of those adverts, which is a little annoying, so I’ve set up AdSense too.

AdSense is the opposite of AdWords. It’s where I get to add other people’s adverts to my sites and I get a trickle of cash for doing so. Typically I’ve seen clicks earning me about 10p to £1 each, but clicks are fairly rare. I don’t (yet) know enough about CPM and those kind of fancy buzzwords to tell you any real figures. I’m sure I’ll blog something in the new year.

So now I’ve got the three A’s working nicely for Dabr:

• AdWords to bring in potential new users,
• AdSense to bring in a little cash,
• and Analytics to track site usage.

Thanks Google :)

The AdSense account is used to show ads down the side of this site, which I thought was an interesting idea to see what kind of money it can pull in. It’s not much, about £1.67 in 40 days. It has highlighted something annoying to me though.

Google lets you link up your Analytics account to your AdSense account so you can get some fairly interesting statistics like those shown in the screenshot on the right. I like it a lot as I’m a big fan of Analytics and what it can do. Unfortunately, they’ve made the next part a little frustrating: you can only link one of your Analytics accounts to AdSense (remember I have three).

So what if I want to show AdSense stats on another account? I can’t. You’re not even allowed to set up a second AdSense account because the sign up form specifically tells you not to (and makes you tick a box to agree to that). To add even more frustration, unlinking your Analytics and AdSense accounts is a manual process and you need to visit Google’s How do I unlink my AdSense account from Google Analytics? page to contact their team to do it for you.

All that for some stats? Thankfully my other experience with both products has been rather smooth – for now at least! In a few days the Dabr account will go over the 5M pageviews/month limit for free accounts and I may need to sign up to AdWords to keep that working. Fun fun.

Storage

Dabr.co.uk stores nothing. Seriously. Well, ok, it logs visits like 99% of websites do on the net. It doesn’t store logins, users, tweets, settings, anything. That’s great in terms of cheaper hosting for me but it restricts what I can make the code do.

@newdabr is different. Very different. Every minute it asks Twitter: “Wazzup??” and stores the response in a database. While @dabr is slow and has to talk to Twitter with every click you make, @newdabr is super-snappy and just asks the local database.

Advantages

So we have this cool database, but how does that help? The list is pretty big and here’s just a few nice examples:

• Pages should load in milliseconds, not seconds.
• Never miss a tweet. @newdabr knows all and can maybe resume from where you were last reading.
• The site can happily auto-refresh.
• Notifications! Yes really.
• Contact grouping – think Tweetdeck columns.
• Expanded URLs. Want to know what a TinyURL really points to? I could cache the results and let you know.
• Persistent settings – e.g. contact groups, colours
• Filtering – e.g. hiding certain hashtags
• Interested in links or photos your friends posted today? @newdabr could list them all for easy access. e.g. sidebar of today’s Twitpics.

Disadvantages

Since @newdabr needs to keep chatting with Twitter all day to work, I imagine it would cost more to run and possibly wouldn’t work with tens or hundreds of accounts. For that reason, it’s going to be a slow-starting project with just me using it at first and a few alpha testers along the way.

Timeline

What’s one of those? Sorry, I’ve got no idea when I’ll work on it but I will keep updating the @newdabr Twitter account any time I make changes.

More geeky updates, less waffle. No promises.

Scoble refuses to not do it:

“My link blog is for keeping what I think are the most important RSS items of the day, including mine.”

The positive side of doing it is that you’re potentially pushing your blog into more people’s RSS readers. The only negative feedback I’ve read so far consists of one of these two arguments:

• Duplicates – This is reasonable, hopefully Google Reader is now smart enough not to show an item twice. If not, it’s probably something they’re trying to do.
• “I don’t like your blog” – People saying this have a fair point. For now, their only choice is to put up with it or unsubscribe.

I’m personally going to add this to my own Shared Items (david.carrington AT gmail DOT com if that helps).

Since then, I’ve managed to add Scoble and Chris F. Masse, but still no Nick! Does Google not like him? Has he offended somebody?

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

1. Removing him from GTalk and re-adding
2. Deleting the whole GMail contact and re-adding

What can I try next?

The screenshot above shows that not only did Scoble share the feed item in question, but my colleague Nick Clarke also shared it. Previously, this would have come up as two items for me to read, once in Nick’s shared items feed and again in Scoble’s feed.

This is a slight step forward to the point where items with more “shares” are promoted for reading. I don’t think there’s a current interface to accomplish this though.

I’ve already got Gmail storing my MSN logs, my ICQ logs, and everything else. Pretty much all Google have accomplished here is to a) sign a deal with AOL to create an official Jabber transport for AIM, and b) change the Gmail interface slightly.

I’m not all negative though! With Google comes stability. I’ve had to switch Jabber transports quite a few times for MSN, since I’ve had trouble finding stable servers. I’d really appreciate if Google could create a stable transport for MSN and offer that out in the same way.

Manual labour

About 6 times per day, I press a button on my phone and it sends a text message to my website with my current cell tower ID. My website then takes over and does all the smart stuff by itself. If I’ve traveled somewhere new, it automatically looks up the cell ID in a large UK database using their API to find the latitude and longitude of the cell tower I’m currently connected to. But big decimal numbers showing my current latitude and longitude aren’t all that interesting on their own.

Sidebar widget

The next step in my process was to add the widget on the side of my website to show everyone my current location. It’s not particularly fascinating – either I’m in my home town, at work, or traveling somewhere in between. But I’ve just added something a little more interesting.

Google Earth

Whereas before the link on my current location just took you to the coordinates where I’m currently sat, it will now load up a KML file showing a nice picture of a man standing on my current location, and hopefully a number of little cell towers which will show where I’ve been over the last 7 days.

The historic data isn’t all that interesting in Google Maps, but if I open up my KML file in Google Earth then I expose the timeline controls and I can choose to see where I was at different times and even animate my location over time.

What’s next?

I’ve got a habit of always wanting to do more.  I’ve cleaned up my location database so I could add in other locations (i.e. not just cell towers) and try plotting even more data. I’d like to try the following:

• Load up GPS data for any hikes I go on
• Add a few key locations onto the map such as the Scout hut, my brother’s place in Canada, anything relevant to me
• Add some kind of refresh so that it updates automatically when I’m on the move
• Create some kind of JavScript timeline interface for Google Maps

It’s very basic right now. All it does is pull out the phone’s currently connected cell tower and logs it to a text box on the screen. This data can also be sent via SMS or HTTP to my website to update my current location.

Also today, I created a PHP script to update my current Jaiku location. This isn’t in place yet, but I eventually intend to integrate this into my GSM Stumbler application. Future ideas include: looking up the location as human-readable format on the device, detecting multiple nearby base stations and their signal strength (for triangulation) and more Jaiku support.