My Blog

My blog covering various topics like travel, family, and technology.

 

How To Use Google Analytics

Blue Zoo's Collin Condray presented a talk in October at the Walton College Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center titled, "How to Use Google Analytics and Social Media Analytics to Grow Your Business" The hands-on seminar covered the analysis of...

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Essential Google Analytics Metrics – Part 3

Google Analytics is a must-have step in building your online presence. As mentioned in my previous posts on Google Analytics Metrics (part 1, part 2), there are many metrics that you can use to track your online results. Analytics uses data to find patterns, measure...

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Google Analytics Metrics-Part 2

As mentioned in my previous post, Google Analytics is a must have tool that Blue Zoo installs on every site we build. With so much information available about metrics, it can be confusing to know what is important to measure and track. Here are my tips on using Google...

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Google Analytics Metrics-Part 1

Google Analytics is an amazing tool. It allows you to find out how visitors are interacting with your site. We install it on every website that Blue Zoo Creative builds. This tool offers a wealth of information that you can use to improve the number and experience of...

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Where Do My Website Visitors Come From?

Increasing website traffic is a common goal of most website owners, but to do so, you have to know how visitors get to your site. There are four main sources for website visitors: organic search, paid search, direct, and referral.    Organic search and paid...

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Off-Site Search Engine Optimization-Basics

In my previous post about on-site SEO, I discussed what you can do on your site to make it more attractive to search engines, but that is only half the story. The other key factor for SEO is what you can do off your website to get noticed by search engines. Currently,...

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Choosing the Right Keywords for SEO

- Updated April 2015 - Choosing the right keywords can make a big difference in your ability to rank high in search results. Not all keywords are effective in the world of SEO (search engine optimization). Some are more important than others. You might be trying to go...

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Search Engine Optimization for Your Website

Search engine optimization (SEO) is very important for attracting new visitors to your site. The way search engines rank your site has changed dramatically over the past few years. If you set your site up more than a couple of years ago with SEO in mind, you might be...

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How to Pick A Domain Name

There are two broad tactics on how to pick a domain name. The first approach is you use a name that has one of the keywords that you're targeting. For example, if you sold widgets, you might try to register buywidgets.com, qualitywidgets.com or nwawidgets.com as your...

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Tracking for Success

They may not be exciting, but analytics are crucial when setting up an e-commerce site. At the minimum, you should set up Google Analytics on your site to see where the majority of your traffic is coming from and what items on your site people are looking at the most....

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Marketing with Social Media

Social media can be a great way to capture new business leads and establish your credibility. A quick way to do this is to head over to search.twitter.com and look for the “advanced search” option. If you’re a local company, make sure that you put in the location...

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Using Ads to Boost Your Business

Here are some tips for using ads to boost your business. One way to get your site noticed and get new site visitors is through the use of Facebook Ads and Google Ads. Facebook ads are displayed in the right column of Facebook and can be targeted to a specific...

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SEO Basics Seminar Deck

This is the presentation that went along with the seminar that I gave on SEO. It showed you how to research your keywords, make your web site search engine friendly, optimize content for your target keywords, and other techniques to get your site noticed by Google and...

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WordPress 101-Editing Posts

WordPress Posting Options This is the presentation and video that I gave at the Northwest Arkansas Network Builders BNI group on 5/31/2012. It describes three ways of getting information into WordPress: WordPress dashboard, iOS app, and Microsoft LiveWriter. The room...

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A Brief Overview of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Web searches are still one of the most important ways that businesses are found online, but it can be mysterious how your competitors' sites are in the top search ranks while your site doesn't show up until page three. In this talk, presented to the Northwest Arkansas...

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Follow Me Here

As you can tell, I'm not really posting much around here any more. The best place to catch me is either on Twitter or on Posterous. I'll update this page the next time I take an awesome trip or something else big happens. Thanks for visiting!

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Location Based Services and Small Groups

Here is the presentation that I shared about using location-based services (Facebook places, Foursquare) to promote small groups such as the NWA Network Builders BNI group. Location Based Services at ASBTDC-May 2011 from Collin Condray Here are some quick tips that...

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Location Based Services at ASBTDC

? via slideshare.net Wednesday I was privileged to speak on behalf of Blue Zoo Websites at the Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center at the University of Arkansas on the topic of location based services (LBS). This presentation covers what LBS are,...

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5 Cool Sites with Free WordPress Themes

While looking for a new look for my site, I came across these sites with great themes: 23 Best Wordpress Themes 2010 58 Latest Free Wordpress Theme of Last 3 Months Best Free & Premium WordPress Themes BlogingBloging Top 10 WordPress Themes Of August 2010 For Free...

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6 Excellent Chrome Extensions

A coworker recently switched from Firefox to Google Chrome. I made several suggestions for the first extensions that she should install. Here they are in no particular order: Trash Can-Remembers and lets you reopen previously closed tabs. Nice if click the close...

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11 Essential WordPress Plugins

I've recently updated several of my Wordpress sites. I took this opportunity to check my plugin lists and see if there are any new or updated plugins that I had to have for every Wordpress installation. Here is a list that I'll probably add to about 90% of my new...

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Quick and Dirty Traffic Research Using bit.ly Links

We've all seen bit.ly links in a million Tweets before, but they have more uses than just saving you a few characters in your posts. Bit.ly provides good click through reporting that can show you how many of your followers clicked on your link and when they clicked...

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Germany Vacation July 16 – Lake Titisee

Just to get it out of the way, yes, you do say it that way, and no you can't do it there. The Black Forest is well known for its tourism. One of the more popular places near Freiburg to visit is Lake Titisee. We had absolutely gorgeous weather that day, and the region...

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Germany Vacation July 14 – Knoedel Time

I take it back; the Germans are not as crazy as I thought. It's normal hot today, and everybody is wearing shorts, but I don't see a lot of sandals, which is weird considering we're in the land of Birkenstock. Once again we got up early and headed back to Aunt Agnes'...

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More Family Photos

I finally got around to organizing an uploading a new batch of photos of everyone: Summer With Sophia Home With Liam and Sophia Family Portraits Summertime With Liam and Sophia Liam and Sophia with Their Cousins Summertime With Liam and Sophia 2 Liam's Baby Shower...

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Lots of New Photos

For some reason, I've been a little busy since Liam came home. However, holiday vacation time has given me some time to get some pictures up. Here's the first group of them with more coming as time permits: Seoul 2008 Meeting Liam Seoul 2008 Meeting Liam Friday Liam...

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Family and Friends in Korea

We've met a lot of people in the last couple of days. On Friday, we got to see Liam again. We got to spend another hour with him and his foster family and we have another video of him. [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/1289294[/vimeo] Later that day, we met with some of our old...

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Liam’s Video Fixed

It looks like I set the wrong permissions on Liam's video. I've fixed the permissions and you should be able to see it below now: [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/1268653[/vimeo]

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Sophia’s Foster Parents: Thursday

Yesterday, Kathleen and I got to meet Sophia's foster family, Mrs. Lee and Mr. Choi. We had a wonderful time catching up in spite of the language barrier. They took us to one of their big shopping centers to buy gifts for Sophia. We founds lots of dolls for Sophia but...

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Meeting Liam Yoon Seo

We got to meet Liam the first time today and he is totally adorable! He wasn't too sure about us at first and didn't want anyone else to hold him other than his foster family. But Kathleen sang to him and I took him down to see the fish which he thought was hilarious....

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Sophia Dancing

I hope to get some video out to everyone during our Korea trip. Here's one of Sophia dancing her little heart out. [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/1253819[/vimeo]

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We’ve Got a Big Boy

Kathleen heard from the Korean social workers that last month, Liam was already 19 pounds! Hopefully, he'll be here in a month or two. Vote in the poll in the sidebar and guess how big he'll be when he gets home!

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It’s A Boy!

We've accepted a referral today and it's a boy! We're still trying to pick a name. Let us know what name fits in the poll in the sidebar.

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How to install Catalyst on XAMPP

I've been struggling for a while to get one of my favorite web frameworks, Perl's Catalyst on to one of my favorite LAMP servers,  XAMPP with little success. With the help of Ishigaki Kenichi over at http://ppm.tcool.org/ I've figured out a way get everything running....

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2007 Christmas Photos

Christmas photos from the various places we spent the holidays in 2007 are up: Little Rock Fayetteville Conway Just in case you missed it, here's Sophia with Santa last year: And Sophia this year: Poor little girl!

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You Might Notice Something Different Around Here…

And now you know why you haven't seen any posts in a while. I hope that you like the new site! I was using the Joomla CMS with the Wordpress plugin to run my site. However, I never used more than a few of the Joomla features. The Wordpress plugin hasn't been updated...

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Vacation 2007

Sophia and the family had a good time on vacation last month at both grandparents' houses. See what we were up to in the gallery.

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Sophia with Family

Sophia has spent a lot of time with family. See her at Easter, at the Roy family reunion, hanging out with her cousins and Grandparents. There's also photos of her at the courthouse to become a citizen and some family portraits with Mom and Dad.

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Changing My RSS Feed

I'm thinking about changing the RSS feed of the site to include not only the posts from this but some of my other social networking sites using Yahoo! Pipes. To do this I have to change my default feed and I'd like to get an idea of who's currently subscribed to my...

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Sophia In Her Hanbok

We had a few portraits made of Sophia in her hanbok. Apparently, she wasn't as cooperative in this session as her Christmas photos but its really hard to tell. Make sure you fill out the poll and let us know which hanbok do like better.

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Baby Showers

Sophia has been a very busy girl. She's been to two showers and visited all her grandparents. See what she's been up to here, here, and here. Also, check out the great picture of Sophia's visit to her cousins, Kennedy and Jude. I'll try to get up some more pictures of...

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Sophia’s First Weekend Out

Last weekend was Sophia's first weekend out into the wide world with new people. We took a lot of pictures of her in a lot of places. There in the gallery for you to view. Our friend Ken also got a lot of good pictures as well.

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Korea Trip Photos Updated

I've finally uploaded all the photos that we took in Korea and of Sophia after returning home. There are in the Seoul 2006 directory in the gallery. While uploading the files, I accidentally deleted the comments that I included on some of the images. Instead of trying...

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DMZ Photo Comments

I've added a bunch of comments to the DMZ photos. I'll try to add comments to the other photos that I've got when I have time. Enjoy!

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Meeting Sophia

We got to meet Sophia this morning! She was completely adorable in her cute little pink bow. I didn't get any pictures of Kathleen with her but I did take about 20 minutes of video. I had some technical difficulties with getting the still photos up. Hopefully, I can...

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Help Pick A Name

Kathleen and want to keep Sophia's Korean name, Je In, as her middle name. However, we're not sure what spelling we should choose. We could keep Je In but then she'd have 4 initials which is very JRR Tolkien. The other option would be to stick the names together but...

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It’s A Girl!

As most of you know, Kathleen and I are adopting a little girl from Korea named Je In. I've posted her pictures and a short video of her in the gallery. As we get more pictures of her I'll post them there. If you've gotten a direct link to the video, please use the...

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Major Website Redesign

I've been working on moving my site to a new server and upgrading the guts of it to a full fledged Content Management System (CMS) named Joomla. I'm really impressed by Joomla and the functionality it provides. It has a lot of plugins to it that knit together various...

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Vacation Time With Mickey

Ken (here and here) and Pete are pretty much of the same opinion as me on the Orlando trip, it was a great time! I can't add too much to what they said. I put the pictures that I took in the gallery. Our itenerary went pretty much like this: Day 1 Universal Studios...

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Taskbar Ordering

Lifehacker had a link to a program that I have been looking for for a long time, Taskbar++ . It lets you move your applications around on the task bar much like you can move tabs around in Firefox or Avant Browser. I really like this because there are times that you...

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Text Only Copying

I do a lot of work with Excel files and oftentimes have to paste its contents into Lotus Notes. When you do this it pastes the data in as an image file instead of just plain text. PureText is a great tool to take whatever you have copied to the clipboard and converts...

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College Courses as Podcasts

Purdue University is podcasting several of its courses and calling it the Boilercast. I'm currently listening to CSR 342 - Personal Finance which is a really excellent course on investing. The descriptions of the classes aren't included in the podcast description but...

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Quick Web Server

In the notes of the PHP documentaion there is a link to a neat application called Uniform Server. It is a program that has a combination Apache server, Perl and PHP interpreter, mySQL server, and the phpMyAdmin program in one package. The nice thing is that all of it...

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Essential Software

I've recently had to rebuild my computer which required me to reinstall all of my software. Its given me the chance to update and try out a bunch of software that I think would be useful for everyone: General xplorer2 Do you like the tabbed browser feature of modern...

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Tulsa Zoo Pictures

A couple of weekends ago, we went to the Tulsa Zoo. The zoo was kind of lame but I think we had a good time and the day ended well with dinner at PF Chang's. Here are some pictures. If you don't have time to look at them all, the keeper is this one.

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Gmail Switch

I've gotten a new Gmail account and I'm considering switching to it as my main email account. I've been using my current permanent email account for almost 9 years. I'm afraid to switch away from it because I've subscribed to so much stuff over the years, I might not...

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Ewww….

Last week I was doing some training in St. Paul. One of the things we did was go on a few store walks to see how the stores have set up their displays. On one of these trips, the trainer pointed out a disturbing characteristic in almost every store we went to. In most...

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Tivo, Schmeevo

Recently, I've been working on converting my old desktop into a MythTV PVR. I'm using the KnoppMyth version of Knoppix Linux that has MythTV bundled with one installation CD so you can install both of them in one action. Or at least that's the idea in theory. In...

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Minnesota Wildlife

So I'm doing some training in St. Paul, MN and I'm getting ready to turn to get to my hotel and what do I see on the lawn in front of it? A FREAKIN' BEAR! (free registration or go to bugmenot.com to get a shared login). (I know I said I wouldn't do any personal stuff,...

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Blog Reboot

As you can see, the blog has been down for a while. I'm sorry I've been gone. I've been extremely busy with a new job and I'm also a slow, easily distracted writer. The next question that I had when decided to restart my blog is what should I write about? I have...

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RSS Feed Suggestions

I read a lot of blogs every day so for me, until recently, that meant going to each of websites and looking at the entire site to get the latest news. I knew that most blogs have RSS/XML/Atom feeds (including this blog) but didn't think much about using them until I...

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What is really happening today?

I was turned on to a neat website today, Today In Alternate History, Important Events In History That Never Occurred Today. Its a neat site, but don't read it too long or you'll forget which timeline your actually in.

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Visit to Chicago

Daily GalleriesChicago 2004Since I enjoyed travel blogging in Japan so much, I've decided to revive it again for my recent trip to Chicago. Kathleen was attending a conference there, and she used some of her frequent flyer miles to wrangle me a cheap ticket to Chicago...

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Thank You And Good Bye!

It's the day after JSAP 2004 and I am in somewhat of a sad mood even after being greeted by loved ones who I have deeply missed. I have had a terrific time with all of you on our trip to Japan. This was such an incredible opportunity to visit a country in such unique...

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Going Home

We had to get to the station for our 1:10 PM train so we had a little time in Kameoka before we left. We finally kept our appointment with E-chan to pick up some Japanese food and spices for the trip home and to use in our own cooking experiences. After packing our...

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Shopping in Kyoto

Today started off a little late with a visit to the Internet cafe to send a few emails home and let everyone know when we'd be getting home. After that we headed to our favorite yakimeshi place up the road to enjoy lunch. The lady who runs the restaurant had finally...

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