Summer Finally Here

Well, the exams have come and gone. No more stressing out trying to remember the formula for a poisson distribution or how to say how many people are in my family in italian (Nella mia familglia ci sone sette persone) btw.
                   Time to relax, turn off the brain and concentrate on losing weight and getting fit for the summer. I have been getting into running this year, started out with the CIT fun run 5k  back in april, which i did in 40 mins or so. Which is very slow but i was glad to just complete it.

 

  Next up was due to be the  http://www.todayfm.com/shows/weekdays/ray-darcy-show/JoinRayFor5K.aspx but in the end i was so broke that week with my 2 months rent due that i couldn't afford the petrol money to killarney and back :(

After this i decided to do the 4 mile part of the Cobh annually 10 mile run. I did that in 42 mins and was very happy with that. And the third and final race ive done so far was The Cheetah Run (4 Mile) in Fota which i managed in 37 mins and 13 seconds, alot faster than i was expecting. Just signed up for a 10k in late July so i'll be training for that over the coming weeks.

WEEK 11

Google Analytics was delved into again. It can be very usefull to find out what parts of your website work best and who to aim it towards. You can see what percentage of your audience are new or returning visitors. Your Bounce Rate may indicate that the add used to direct traffic to your website is misleading. The Average Duration of Visit is also shown.

The Service Provider used to browse your website is shown, as well as screen resolution. The keywords used to find your site are shown. Using all this information you can tailor your service to a specific demographic. And general improve any areas that need work.

WEEK 12

Search Engine Optimization was discussed again. First topic to be mentioned was description meta tags, and how we should use simple to understand URLs to convey content information easily on our websites. Creating a simple directory structure was recomended, along with using keywords in our URLs to help acheive a higher google ranking.
Only using one URL for a page is best as otherwise the google ranking can be split. If location is important then using a local address such as http://www.daft.ie/ is recommended. Your site should use well formed HTML or XHTML code and easy to read text. Anchor text sets up links to other pages or sites, and using keywords in the actually link is best.
Avoid puting text in images. You can use robots.txt to get a search engine to ignore unfinished pages of your website, but more secure methods of hiding sensitive data should be used.
In the second class blogs were talked about, how they were precursors to other more popular social media. Anyone can create a blog but not everyone will find an audience. Social media has had a large inpact on how our modern society communicates, twitter has become a faster way of breaking news than news channels. I personally don't watch much news on tv, prefering to use my twitter feed to find interesting stories and online articles.