Google Analytics Visitors' Screen Resolutions Report

Earlier when I decided to redesign my blog I asked myself this question: what screen size should I design for? I answered myself by looking at the visitor data collected by Google Analytics. Even though I decided to go for a responsive design, a screen resolution report provided my with some interesting insights. For example I inferred that more than 75% of my visitors would be able to see the newly introduced 970x90px large leaderboard AdSense ads.

301 Redirect Your Old Blogger Blog to New Address

Back in February I decided to change the address of my blog from 911-need-code-help.blogspot.com to salman-w.blogspot.com. Changing the blog address is straightforward; however, I wanted the following to happen after the change:

• Backlinks to the old blog should continue to work
• Visitors attempting to access the old blog should be redirected to the new blog automatically
• Search engine ranking for the old blog should be transferred to the new blog

In short, I needed to redirect old URLs to new ones. Given that Blogger does not have an option to redirect URLs to another blog and mod-rewrite/server-side scripting is not available either; my only option was to use zero second meta refresh tag which is (claimed to be) treated as a 301/permanent redirect by Google. So, here is what I did:

NOTE THAT THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT MOVING FROM ONE BLOGSPOT.COM ADDRESS TO ANOTHER. If you are moving from Blogspot hosting to custom domain, you (probably) don't have to do anything special. If you are moving from one custom domain to another, ask your domain name provider to setup a 301 redirect on the old domain.

Google Analytics Day of Week and Hour of Day Reports

Google Analytics provides very detailed analytics for your website; but there is always room for more. People who use (or have used) traditional web analytics software such as AWStats, Analog and Webalizer are familiar with the "days of week" and "rush hour" reports, neither of them are directly available in Google Analytics.

The traffic for a website vary by day of week and it is very useful to know when a website expects most (or least) visitors. Sometimes these statistics help you make decisions such as when to launch a promotion or take down a website for maintenance.