Ponderings and Wanderings

Exclude your offices as well as those of your agencies, consultants and other consultants from your Web site statistics.  Google Analytics, HitBox, Webtrends and all other packages allow for such exclusions by IP address, domains and other strings. Sometimes you may also want to exclude the IP address of home computers. This is especially true for sites that receive very low traffic.

How do you find your IP Address.  Surf to a site such as  http://www.lawrencegoetz.com/programs/ipinfo/.  This will reveal your external IP address.  Collect the various addresses and place these on exclusion lists. 

Note that any settings usually only start excluding from the stats on a move forward basis.

Since I placed up my post about MediaWiki I have received some feedback from individuals and companies. I have now tired out more than half a dozen products and services.  What stands out is that every product out there offers close to the same features and functions with variations that are often subtle rather than overt.  In the end I have two findings.

1. It is clear that even my completely unknown and haphazard blog is immediately noticed by those who monitor on their focused topics. Kudos to Atlassian for solid proactive monitoring and marketing efforts.
2. There appears to be solid agreement outside of the world of the techno geek that platforms other than MediaWiki are easier for the end user.

Two folks have contacted me to supplement my original review with products they find useful - Mindtouch Deki and Atlassian Confluence.  Both of these products clearly target the same market as Socialtext to provide a more usable and supported environment then MediaWiki. Both products seem to offer solutions worthy of investigation for those considering Wiki products.

Here are some things I noticed.

• MindTouch’s offering of a free & open source version and source code as well as a free personal Wiki hosting is a great marketing win.
• MindTouch’s marketing clearly to people who tend towards the open source spectrum.  The easy to use free hosting also is very inviting to those who want to get started quickly with experimenting and need a simple quick solution to get running.
• Altlassian has a taken an alternative voice and is focused on IT audiences.  It’s Wiki offering is clearly packaged as one solution of many they offer to enterprise workgroups.  And while they offer similar hosted and license options as others, the marketing focus on features bespeaks their expectation of readers’ familiarity with why one would want a Wiki. Atlassian’s free 30 day evaluation (rather than offering any free personal hosting option) supports this IT focus as well.

Lessons learned: 

1. There are many many options potentially better than MediaWiki.
2. The marketers are targeting their message to different organizations to provide differentiation via message for a product set that is rapidly becoming a commodity.

Technorati Tags: MediaWiki