Antbag.com

Yesterday was one of the better days I’ve had on this blog as far as traffic. The inclusion of my latest theme, Darkwater, on sites such as Weblog Tools Collection, Planet WordPress, and a few others, really drove more than my normal visitors to the site. The spike in traffic was evident no matter which statistics you look at. The experience has left me wondering how accurate these statistics are however. Basically, out of four or five different statistics providers, none of them matched.

Pretty soon after I set this site up in February, I uploaded the WP Shortstat Plug-in, which makes it real easy to glance at your stats whenever your in the WordPress Dashboard. I really like it, and that is what I usually check. Last night it was reporting to me that my site had taken 2,398 hits with 1,202 unique visitors. At the same time, I logged into MyBlogLog, which showed 1,153 page views with 801 unique visitors. hmm. I know I’m not the first person to ever raise the question, but to be off by that much had me scratching my head.

Several other places I decided to look at my stats after realizing this, was Statcounter.com and the statistics provided by my web host, 1 and 1. This is where it gets really interesting. 1 and 1 Hosting reports that I had 3,434 page views with 1,695 unique visitors. That sounds like a lot to me. Well when I checked StatCounter.com, they report that I only had 89 pageviews with 44 unique visitors.

Huh???

Now that’s a big difference! So, I’m wondering, where would I get the most accurate statistics? Regardless of which is right, I at least know that I had a lot more visitors than normal.

Tags: Web by Anthony ∗ 15 Comments »

Have you ever thought about what your character might look like if you were on South Park? Honestly, I’ve never really thought about it, but my blogger friend Shane at Zoomstart has put together this little meme that looks like a lot of fun.

I’ve seen South Park before, however I’m not a regular viewer. A cartoon with potty-mouth characters probably wouldn’t mix well with a chatty two and a half year old.

South Park Studio is a neat little tool where you can build a SP character from the ground up. The deal with this meme is for bloggers to build themselves with this tool so, I suppose, we can all laugh at one another!

Sound like fun? All right! If I were on the show, I’ve determined that this is probably how I would look……

Now, to complete my part in the game, I need to pass this own to a few people. Let’s see, how about Azmeen, ClarkeW, Jake, and Ian. If you guys don’t want to participate, no big deal.

Tags: Networking, Personal by Anthony ∗ 11 Comments »

As I’ve mentioned before, sometimes I follow incoming links to see who’s using one of my themes. I’ve come across some really cool sites. I may in the near future provide links to some of my favorites……some for content and others for their modifications.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a few I didn’t bother visiting due to the url. I realize when you make something freely available, you have no control of what type of site uses it……unfortunately. I’ve seen a few I wish would move on to a different design….

I looked at one blog in which the author introduced the new theme, and went on to say how awful it was. He then told how he needed to get started designing his site. haha, I got a good laugh from that.

I also had a comment left on the Theme-Viewer this past week regarding my Darkwater theme that said:

THIS SUX. L2CODE NooB.

I assume “L2CODE NooB” means “learn to code, newbie“……? I really thought that was funny, coming from someone who left a fake web address. Most of the time when some weasel leaves a STUPID comment like that, they hide who they are. Maybe I’ll start a company called “L2CODE Web Design by a NooB”.

Anyway, I made my first theme available about a month ago, on May 24. I’ve released one every Thursday since for a grand total of five so far. As of this writing, my themes have been downloaded 2,532 times. I think that’s a pretty strong number…….more than I expected.

Building these themes and making them available has been a lot of fun. I hope to continue on as time permits.

Tags: Design by Anthony ∗ 3 Comments »

Quiet, Peaceful……..tranquility.

That’s the best way I know of to describe Darkwater. This theme is a little different, and I’m rather proud of it. I wanted to do something a little more experimental with this one.

Darkwater is a 3 Column theme with two right sidears. It’s CSS valid and widget ready.

Preview and Download!

Tags: Wordpress Themes by Anthony ∗ 52 Comments »

I’ve released an update for my YellowJacket Theme with the following problems fixed:

• Reduced the width of the Comment Form to fit the page better.
• Fixed the positioning of the footer. If there were no posts or only a short post, the footer was not staying on the bottom in Internet Explorer. This has been fixed.
• Also fixed the sidebar to make it display correctly in IE6.

As far as I know, that’s all the issues that have come up. If anyone has any problems with it, please let me know. If you download it from the Theme-Viewer site, you’ll now get the updated version(1.1).

Tags: Design by Anthony ∗ 9 Comments »

I read a post at Daily Blog Tips that gave some internet statistics, and I thought it was interesting. Being fairly new at building WordPress themes, I especially took notice of the percentage of internet users still using Internet Explorer 6. While I’m more of a Firefox man myself, I can understand why a Windows user would just use Internet Explorer. If you are an IE user, please UPDATE TO VERSION 7.

Internet Explorer 6 is one of the biggest thorns in the side for a web designer. You can have a design complete and looking awesome……..until you test it out in IE6. Internet Explorer displays things differently than what is considered a more standards compliant browser. I’m sure IE5 and older are probably even worse. So the question is, why not update? It won’t cost you anything.

I’m not one of these people who are hostile towards Microsoft, but I think if you gave Firefox a try, you certainly wouldn’t miss IE. I’m sure no browser is perfect, but Internet Explorer 7 is leaps and bounds better than version 6 in every way. It looks better, it’s faster, and it’s much more likely to display a web page like it’s suppose to be.

*Statistics were compiled by W3Counter.

Tags: Design, Web by Anthony ∗ 21 Comments »