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.