5 Alternatives to Google Analytics

5 Alternatives to Google Analytics

Do you use Google Analytics to track your website visitors and analyze your content? It’s one of the best and most popular online tools for Web analytics and reporting. However, there are many people who are looking for alternative tools and want to step away from Google Analytics.

Luckily, there are many options available if you are looking for an alternative. Although we can’t possibly include every single alternative tool on this list, we are going to highlight five great Google Analytics alternatives that you may want to consider using:

1. SessionCam

SessionCam is a unique online tool that lets you record and replay every visit to your website. This means you can see every mouse and scroll to hit your site. You can even see forms as they’re being filled out. You’ll also have access to heatmaps, Web analytics, conversion funnels and field drop-off reports.

SessionCam is really great for those wanting to track their visitors every step of the way. Plus, you can improve your conversation rates and re-market to customers or visitors who may have abandoned your website in the past.

Pricing: Free for up to 500 pages per month, Small/Medium ($ 30.00/month), Enterprise (Contact Sales Team)

SessionCam

2. Woopra

Woopra is my personal favorite alternative to Google Analytics and includes many of the same features. It’s a monitoring tool that displays important stats and analytics about your visitors in real-time. You can also generate reports and send out emails inviting customers to revisit your Website, using their Retention Analytics tool.

One of the cool things about Woopra is that it’s a “comprehensive, real-time profile and timeline for every user, tracking [everyone] from anonymous visitors to converted unique customers across multiple devices.”

Pricing: Basic (Free), Startup ($ 79.95/month), Small Business ($ 199.95/month), Premium ($ 499.95/month)

Woopra

3. Inspectlet

Inspectlet provides four great features: visitor screen capture, eye-tracking heatmaps, real-time analytics, and custom metrics. Like SessionCam, you can watch your visitors as they use your website  - clicks, scrolling, and typing. Their analytics go far beyond pageviews: you get a bird’s ey e view of everything happening on your website, in real-time.

Inspectlet also provides conversion funnels which lets you define a series of pages that lead to a goal, and then watch visitors as they go through those pages. You can then see where visitors are dropping off and use this data to improve and increase your conversion rates.

Pricing: Free, Micro ($ 9.99/month), Standard ($ 39.99/month), Pro ($ 69.99/month), Large ($ 119.99/month)

Inspectlet

4. Reinvigorate

Reinvigorate is described as a “simple, real-time Web analytics and heatmaps” tool. However, with all of the available features, this tool is far from simple. You can track your Website visitors and active pages in real-time. You’ll also get “the hottest” heatmaps for in-depth click-tracking and analysis.

Reinvigorate also has a desktop tool called Snoop, so you’ll be able to see all of your data and stats from your computer desktop. Plus you’ll get dinged every time you have a new visitor, new sale, new user signup, and more. The Web version includes: granular graphing, detailed visitor reporting, referral tracking, page-level details, globally distributed tracking, and much more.

Although there isn’t a free plan, all three paid plans come with a 14-day free trial.

Pricing: Starter ($ 10/month), Pro ($ 20/month), Custom (from $ 100/month)

Reinvigorate

Gauges is great for analyzing your Web traffic in real-time. Their AirTraffic feature displays a real-world map that updates in real-time with traffic stats. So each time you get a new visitor, you’ll see what page they’re on and where they’re from. Gauges’ intuitive interface displays your data with beautiful charts and graphs, which are all available from a single dashboard.

With a focus on “how much, where from, and where to,” you can quickly see the status of your website’s activity (if activity is up/down). You can also see how your content is performing and see which posts/pages are doing well.

Although there isn’t a free plan, all three paid plans come with a 7-day free trial.

Pricing: Solo ($ 6/month), Small ($ 12/month), Large ($ 48/month)

If you’re looking for even more options, you may also want to consider Clicky, Clickmap, ClickTale, LuckyOrange or StatCounter.

For tho se who prefer a self-hosted solution, you can also check out Pwiki, Mint, or Open Web Analytics

What’s Your Pick?

Do you use Google Analytics for your website, one of these alternatives, or something else? Please let us know in the comments.

5 Books Every Linux Enthusiast Should Read

5 Books Every Linux Enthusiast Should Read

Even though there’s a wealth of online information about Linux available on the Internet, one of the best ways to learn is still a good old-fashioned book. Well, not completely old-fashioned. Many of these Linux books are available in electronic formats. The following is a list of five Linux books that every enthusiast should read.

1. The C Programming Language

This classic guide, known as “K&R” among programmers, is a compact guide to the C language, much as the title suggests. Unlike the thousand-page tomes out there, this book, written by C’s creators, the late Dennis Ritchie (also one of the creators of Unix) and Brian Kernighan, the second edition weighs in at a comparatively slim 272 pages, including the appendices. Anyone familiar with the terse style of the manpages should know what to expect from this book. It’s for people who are comfortable programming and doesn’t waste ink explaining basic concepts.

“C is not a big language, and it is not well-served by a big book,” the authors explain in the preface.

The reason serious Linux users (who seem to turn into programmers anyway) should read this book, even if they don’t use C very much and aren’t experienced programmers, is that much of Linux is written in C .

2.Unix Power Tools

Unlike K&R, this is a hefty book by O’Reilly, one of the major technical book publishers. You don’t have to slog through the book page by page as the authors have designed the book as a series of short chapters written in a breezy style. It’s great for Unix and Linux users of every skill level to learn something new, from setting up the terminal to Perl programming.

Since the short pieces are extensively cross-referenced, you’ll find yourself bouncing around the book, almost like a paper edition of TV Tropes. It’s a fun book that you’ll le arn a lot from. I’ve used the style as a model for my posts here at Make Tech Easier.

3. Essential System Administration

Aeleen Frisch’s guide is another hefty tome, thought this one deals with, you guessed it, system administration. This book deals with various Unix flavors, including Red Hat and SUSE Linux. You can usually apply the information to nearly any Linux flavor out there. Frisch doesn’t skimp on information.

Even if you’re only managing a personal computer instead of racks and racks of servers, you’re still a system administrator. This is a great book for learning how to take care of your system effectively. A lot of other people swear by UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook Edition; however, though I haven’t read it.

4. Linux and the Unix Philosophy

Mike Gancarz’s update of his classic “The Unix Philosophy” for the Linux era is a manifesto of the Unix philosophy of building small tools designed for the command line, where they can be easily scripted for efficiency. In an age of increasing software bloat, it’s nice to know that there are still people who believe in “keep it simple, stupid!”

5. The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Eric S. Raymond’s classic essay shows how the Linux economy works, even if it should have failed long ago. Raymond shows how Linux is a “bazaar” where lots of people all over the world submit code as opposed to the “cathedral” where only a select few are in charge of a software project at places like Microsoft. True to the open source spirit, it’s available for free online.

Of course, there are plenty of good books on Unix and Linux, much more than can be covered in a single post. Other than the obvious choices of looking on the Internet and in libraries, another good source for Unix and Linux books is universities with good computer science departments.

Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. While we only write about products we think deserve to be on this site, Make Tech Easier may earn a small commission if you click through and buy the product in question.

Image credit: opened book, lying on the bookshelf with a glasses by BigStockPhoto

7 Places to Find Creative Commons Images Online

7 Places to Find Creative Commons Images Online

If you’re a journalist, blogger, or any other type of written content producer, you have likely found yourself hunting for images to use in your publications. It is important when using stock imagery that you make sure the images are licensed for your use. Simply performing a Google image search and grabbing the first file you find might be easy, but you face the risk of stealing someone else’s non-freely licensed work â€" which not only can be considered unethical, but can also damage your reputation.

We have previously written about several general-purpose image search websites . In this article, I’m going to introduce you to seven websites where you can specifically find public domain and Creative Commons images that are free for you to use.

1. Clker

Clker is a resource for public domain clip art with both vector and bitmap images available for download. It is especially good for icons and symbols. One of Clker’s standout features is that it lets you edit any SVG image in a browser-based drawing program. You can use the visual editor or modify the raw SVG source code, which is an easy way to change the colors of elements, as no “paint bucket” tool exists.

2. Open Clip Art Library

While you can find some Open Clip Art Library (OCAL) images on Clker, you must go to the OCAL site to find the rest. You can also install the OCAL to your local machine, making a large portion of the library available offline. Downloadable archives are available from OCAL’s FTP server and, if you’re running Linux, from your package repositories. Note that the offline collection hasn’t been updated since 2010, so there are many more images on the website.

You’ll find a wide variety of clip art in the OCAL; the site doesn’t censor images, but it does ask that uploaders ma rk any potentially offensive images as “Not Safe for Work” (NSFW). In the future, the OCAL will support user requests, so you can tell artists if you want art on a specific theme or topic.

3. Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons has over 15 million free image, sound, and other media files. You can browse by topic-based categories â€" such as animalia, flags, mathematics, and medicine â€" or by location, type (images, sounds, or videos), author, license, or source. All images are licensed either with one of several Creative Commons licenses, the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), or a public domain license.

4. Flickr Creative Commons

A little-known fact about Flickr is that it has a Creative Commons (CC) section. Over 200 million user-uploaded photos and graphics are licensed under Creative Commons; most of them use the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs and Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licenses, but you’ll find a sizeable chunk of images under other CC licenses too. You can browse the images by license and recency, or you can click on “See more” under a particular license type to go to a search page.

5. morgueFile

MorgueFile is a collection of free, high-resolution photos that you can use for personal or commercial purposes. Before users upload images to morgueFile, they must agree to the term: “You are uploading your own images, not a photo of a photo or someone else’s work.” This prevents the site from ending up like Imgur, a popular image sharing site that hosts mostly unoriginal work.

All images on morgueFile are released under the morgueFile license, which specifies that users are free to remix the work, use it for commercial purposes, and use it without attribution.

6. FreeStockPhotos.biz

Despite the spammy-sounding domain name, FreeStockPhotos.biz is an excellent resource for both stock photos and clip art. Each item is licensed individually, so you are expected to scroll down on an image’s page to view its license agreement.

Don’t get distracted by the images labeled “Sponsored Image from Shutterstock”; these ones will just redirect you to the Shutterstock website, which asks you to sign up for a paid subscription before downloading.

7. Creative Commons Search

Creative Commons Search is an interface to search engines on various websites that host free media, including the OCAL, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, Google Images, Fotopedia, and Pixabay. When you use CC Search, CC licensing filters will be automatically applied so that only CC images will turn up in your search results. I find this especially useful for s earching Google Images without manually setting the licensing filters, which can be tedious to do from Google’s own search interface.

CC Search also allows you to search for audio and video files on select sites.

Conclusion

For clip art, check out Clker and the OCAL. If you’re more interested in finding a photo, visit Flickr’s Creative Commons section or morgueFile. You can find both clip art and photography at Wikimedia Commons and FreeStockPhotos.biz.

Where do you go to find images for your content? Do you generally use freely licensed images?

Cool Websites and Tools [January 30th 2013]

Cool Websites and Tools [January 30th 2013]

Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. Most of the listed websites are FREE or come with a decent free account option. If you want to have similar cool website round-ups delivered to your daily email, subscribe here.

Add Your Website Here!

HTML Map Creator â€" There are many websites which make areas of images clickable. Clicking on a different area takes you to a different URL in the sam e window or a new browser. You can now add such multiple links to your images by using a web tool entitled HTML Map Creator, a free to use web service that lets you add multiple links to an online image. Read more: HTML Map Creator: Add Multiple Links To A Single Image

		GotSiteMonitor â€" This is a free to use web service that lets you set up an online monitor for all the websites that you are running. After creating a free account, you can very easily begin adding monitors for your website. You specify the name of the monitor, the URL of your website, the duration of time after which the app should check your site’s status, and th e locations from which you want your site to be monitored. You can set up email, SMS, and phone notifications for when your website goes down. Read more: GotSiteMonitor: Monitor Your Website & Receive Instant Alerts When The Site Is Down
		Traxmo â€" Freelancers often have to closely monitor how long they have been working on a project because they often get paid by the hour. But rather than manually keeping a track of the minutes you have spent on a task and then multiplying the time with your working rate, you can make things much more convenient by using a website called Traxmo. Read more: Traxmo: Automatically Create Invoices Based On The Time You Have Worked On A Project
		Atooma â€" Phone customizations usually only let you change the screen wallpaper, color theme, and brightness options along with other basic adjustments. But if you want to have complete control over your phone and have it automatically execute your defined commands when certain events happen, you should try out an application called Atooma. Read more: Atooma: Have Your Device Automatically Execute Commands When Certain Events Happen [Android 2.1+]
		FlyingWindows â€" While using your computer, it is not easy to focus on one application at a time. You usually have various apps running simultaneously such as your browser and a text editor, and visible windows of other programs make it difficult to focus on the primary app you are using. Here to help Mac users with that is an app called FlyingWindows, a desktop application for Mac computers. Read more: FlyingWindows: Focus On The Application You Are Using [Mac]

These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed.

7 Places to Find Creative Commons Images Online

7 Places to Find Creative Commons Images Online

If you’re a journalist, blogger, or any other type of written content producer, you have likely found yourself hunting for images to use in your publications. It is important when using stock imagery that you make sure the images are licensed for your use. Simply performing a Google image search and grabbing the first file you find might be easy, but you face the risk of stealing someone else’s non-freely licensed work â€" which not only can be considered unethical, but can also damage your reputation.

We have previously written about several general-purpose image search websites . In this article, I’m going to introduce you to seven websites where you can specifically find public domain and Creative Commons images that are free for you to use.

1. Clker

Clker is a resource for public domain clip art with both vector and bitmap images available for download. It is especially good for icons and symbols. One of Clker’s standout features is that it lets you edit any SVG image in a browser-based drawing program. You can use the visual editor or modify the raw SVG source code, which is an easy way to change the colors of elements, as no “paint bucket” tool exists.

2. Open Clip Art Library

While you can find some Open Clip Art Library (OCAL) images on Clker, you must go to the OCAL site to find the rest. You can also install the OCAL to your local machine, making a large portion of the library available offline. Downloadable archives are available from OCAL’s FTP server and, if you’re running Linux, from your package repositories. Note that the offline collection hasn’t been updated since 2010, so there are many more images on the website.

You’ll find a wide variety of clip art in the OCAL; the site doesn’t censor images, but it does ask that uploaders ma rk any potentially offensive images as “Not Safe for Work” (NSFW). In the future, the OCAL will support user requests, so you can tell artists if you want art on a specific theme or topic.

3. Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons has over 15 million free image, sound, and other media files. You can browse by topic-based categories â€" such as animalia, flags, mathematics, and medicine â€" or by location, type (images, sounds, or videos), author, license, or source. All images are licensed either with one of several Creative Commons licenses, the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), or a public domain license.

4. Flickr Creative Commons

A little-known fact about Flickr is that it has a Creative Commons (CC) section. Over 200 million user-uploaded photos and graphics are licensed under Creative Commons; most of them use the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs and Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licenses, but you’ll find a sizeable chunk of images under other CC licenses too. You can browse the images by license and recency, or you can click on “See more” under a particular license type to go to a search page.

5. morgueFile

MorgueFile is a collection of free, high-resolution photos that you can use for personal or commercial purposes. Before users upload images to morgueFile, they must agree to the term: “You are uploading your own images, not a photo of a photo or someone else’s work.” This prevents the site from ending up like Imgur, a popular image sharing site that hosts mostly unoriginal work.

All images on morgueFile are released under the morgueFile license, which specifies that users are free to remix the work, use it for commercial purposes, and use it without attribution.

6. FreeStockPhotos.biz

Despite the spammy-sounding domain name, FreeStockPhotos.biz is an excellent resource for both stock photos and clip art. Each item is licensed individually, so you are expected to scroll down on an image’s page to view its license agreement.

Don’t get distracted by the images labeled “Sponsored Image from Shutterstock”; these ones will just redirect you to the Shutterstock website, which asks you to sign up for a paid subscription before downloading.

7. Creative Commons Search

Creative Commons Search is an interface to search engines on various websites that host free media, including the OCAL, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, Google Images, Fotopedia, and Pixabay. When you use CC Search, CC licensing filters will be automatically applied so that only CC images will turn up in your search results. I find this especially useful for s earching Google Images without manually setting the licensing filters, which can be tedious to do from Google’s own search interface.

CC Search also allows you to search for audio and video files on select sites.

Conclusion

For clip art, check out Clker and the OCAL. If you’re more interested in finding a photo, visit Flickr’s Creative Commons section or morgueFile. You can find both clip art and photography at Wikimedia Commons and FreeStockPhotos.biz.

Where do you go to find images for your content? Do you generally use freely licensed images?

Daily Shutdown – Is It Necessary for Your Computer and Devices?

Daily Shutdown â€" Is It Necessary for Your Computer and Devices?

Today we’re looking at the age-old debate on shutting your computer down daily, or for that matter a device such as a mobile phone or tablet. Is it necessary? Are you hurting anything if you leave it on 24/7? Are you helping anything if you perform a daily shutdown every night and go through the process of turning everything back on the next day?

Energy Saving

There are plenty of concerns for leaving everything on at all times. Chief among those are for energy-saving reasons and that the computer components may be harmed by staying on at all times. Let’s handle the latter first. It has never been proven that leaving your computer on will harm it, or your mobile device for that matter, and many consider that thought to be technology myth.

As far as saving energy, yes it can help to shut your computer down every night. But there are other methods that can save some money as well. Certainly leaving any electronic device plugged in and on will add up on the electrical bill. That’s a valid argument. However, you can also power down the monitor and hard drive overnight so that they are using less energy. It’s somewhat of an electronic compromise.

Will regular shutting down hurt the computer?

Confusing the matter, there are also concerns with doing a daily shutdown on your computer and devices. Some believe that the computer components can be harmed with this practice as well, feeling as the the constant on and off will put additional strain on the components. While it does affect the components, it’s never been proven that it’s a particularly harmful effect.

And of course, the number one reason we want to leave our computers on is because it’s a pain to open up and sign back in to numerous apps and websites. Of course there are plenty of apps and browsers that will save that information and automate the opening process, but it can still be a pain. It’s so much easier just to leave it on. With phones, we often leave them on because we don’t want to miss that important call.

Since it’s a hot debate, we put this question to our staff here at Make Tech Easier, asking them what they do with their machines. Surely we can look to them for some expertise. Not only do we write about them, we’re on them all day long.

Laura Tucker

I’ve gotten into the habit of never shutting anything down. I’m one of those who hates to open everything up again. I used to shut down every night, but no longer. One of the reasons I got out of the habit is because of my use of mobile devices. Most work I do is on my iPad, and there just seems to be no reason to turn that off. When I do shut my Mac Mini, iPad, or iPhone down it’s because I’m turning it right back on again. If something’s not working right, my first option is always a restart. It clears out memory and makes things work quicker and better, even if it’s just a little bit. I do utilize the sleep modes on my Mac and my devices.

Ruji Chapnik

Ruji is a lot like me in this regard. She never shuts down her devices, as she doesn’t see the need. She, too, performs shutdowns when a computer is acting up, yet logs right back in again. “I loathe the process of waiting for my computer to boot, so I avoid shut-downs.† She only shuts her phone down when she’s changing the battery.

Emmanuel Banks

Emmanuel is one of those who shuts his computer down every day, sometimes twice a day, as he does it before bed, as well as before leaving. He doesn’t want to waste the energy of leaving it on all the time. If he has to perform a large upload or when he’s updating OS X on his Mac, it falls under the very few times he will keep it running all night. He likes to use the Mac’s Power Nap feature in that instance.

Damien Oh

Damien is very conscious of his electricity bill, so he, too, shuts down every night. However, he won’t completely shut down, but will perform a hibernate “so it can retain my session for the next boot-up.”

Trevor Dobrygoski

Trevor is another one to make sure everything gets a daily shutdown. He shuts down his Android phone and tablet daily and his Windows laptop gets power-cycled usually every day. He finds the devices gain some speed after a reset, especially his phone. Some apps he uses seem a little glitchy if he doesn’t power down every day or two.

Soumen Halder

For Soumen, the option to leave his computer on or shut it off depends on how the PC is being used. He has a Lenovo laptop with a really bad battery life, so he just leaves it connected to an external monitor and uses it for secondary tasks. He never shuts it down and just does restarts every few weeks or so. On the contrary, his Dell laptop, the PC he uses for all his professional work, enjoys a regular shutdown schedule. It stays in standby when he’s working, and he shuts it down every night.

Like Soumen, whether or not to do a daily shutdown depends much on your usage and what you feel comfortable with. Just know that it’s neither safe nor unsafe for your computer or devices.

Image credit: Save Energy by BigStockPhoto

Quake Spotter – An Easy To Use Way To Track Earthquakes [iOS, Paid Apps Free]

Quake Spotter â€" An Easy To Use Way To Track Earthquakes [iOS, Paid Apps Free]

Earthquakes can be one of the worst forms of natural disasters. For people who live in an area where earthquakes are common, they are a constant threat of which people need to be wary. Some earthquakes have been among the most devastating events in history. It’s one of those things that you try not to think about, but the fact is, you need to be prepared if you live in an area where an earthquake could strike.

Quake Spotter is the perfect application on iOS for keeping track of earthquakes. It uses all the major earthquake services including USGS, EMSC, GeoNet New Zealand, Natural Resources Canada, British Geological Survey, GeoScience Australia, Instituto Geográfico Nacional (Spain), USGS Hawai, Servicio Siamológico Nacional (México), Servicio Siamológico de Chile, and Icelandic Met Office. This means you will always know about any earthquake happening anywhere in the world.

Best of all, you can grab Quake Spotter free from the App Store for a limited time. It will help you stay safe and informed on the latest earthquake information, and it won’t cost you a dime.

Using The App

When the app first launches, it will ask if you would like to allow it to use your current location and whether it can send you push notifications about important earthquake alerts. Depending how you are going to use the app, this might be important for you. If you are using the app more out of curiosity about earthquakes, you may not need these enabled, but if you are using the app because you live in an earthquake zone, you will want to turn these on.

When you launch into the app, it will show you a map with pins indicating earthquakes. The pins are color-coded; small earthquakes are green, medium are yellow, and large quakes are red. Anything over a magnitude of 5 will be shown as red.

You can click any of the pins to see more information about the earthquake. You will be able to see the date, location, and the source of the earthquake information. All the key information about the quake is available right at your fingertips.

If you prefer to see the earthquakes in a list, you can tap the “List” button on the bottom of the screen. You can sort them by date, magnitude, distance and region. Clicking on any of the earthquakes listed will bring to the map view of it with the more information screen opened.

The next section of the application is Settings, which is accessed via the button on the bottom of the screen. From here, you can take control over the information that the app shows you. You can control how close to your location it should show quakes, the minimum and maximum magnitude, and how old the earthquakes should be. You can control the sources, and whether distance is measured and kilometers or miles.

The last section is called “Support.” In here, you can get help using the application or contact the developer with feedback.

Conclusion

If you need to keep track of earthquakes, Quake Spotter is the perfect application for you. It’s easy to use, and it gives you all the key information about the latest earthquake all around the world. Whether you live in an eart hquake zone, or if a friend or loved one lives in one, or if you are just curious to see where the major earthquakes happen, this app has you covered.

The app is free for a limited time from the App Store, but don’t wait, because it will go back to full price before you know it.