Frame test – DiggBar: how much traffic does the DiggBar frame steal from your site?

The sole purpose of this post is to test the effect of site framing.  Specifically, we are testing the DiggBar and how a website’s traffic is affected by it.  We will report openly to the web community with the results of this mini-experiment.  Please follow the guidelines below.  This is the only way our experiment can work and for the results of this test to be accurate (very important):

1. If you are logged into Digg, please Digg this story and visit it through the DiggBar.  Don’t click through to the original.
2. If you are not logged into Digg, click through to the original story without the DiggBar.  Then go ahead and log in.  Digg the story but don’t click through a second time.

We are basing the baseline (constant) traffic that we should be getting on the amount of times the post gets Dugg.  For example: if the post is Dugg 100 times and fellow Diggers follow the above instructions, we should be able to tell how much traffic the DiggBar added/subtracted from overall site traffic.  So if we get 90 pageviews, it would means that 10 pageviews were stolen from us by the DiggBar.

Just in case you were referred here through a different site (not Digg), here is the link to Digg this post:
http://digg.com/tech_news/How_much_traffic_does_the_DiggBar_frame_steal_from_your_site

Why all the fuss?

As we discussed on the TNR Podcast over and over again (as well as countless others in the industry) we don’t like sites that frame other sites.  So we’re putting our traffic where our mouth is and want to find out what effect frames have on overall site traffic.  Frames are the underlying technology behind website bars such as the DiggBar, the Facebook bar, and the Hootsuite bar.  We’re starting our experiment with Digg (being the most tech-savvy place on the web in our opinion ) ).

Since this is an open experiment the results of which will be available freely to everybody, we will post them on Sunday, May 31st, 2009 on the home page of TechNestReport.com.  We will be using the above instructions as the baseline of the experiment and will be collecting traffic data using Google Analytics.

TNR Tip: MacBook and red light coming out of headphone/mic jack

If you’ve ever noticed a red light coming out of your Apple MacBook’s headphone or microphone jacks, here is what’s happening and why. Read more »

TNR Tip: “physically” label your external drives

For our first TechNest Report weekly tip, we talk about… hard drive organization the old-school way!

I don’t know about you, but I have a few external hard drives that I use on a regular basis.  Some I use for backing up specific machines; others I use storing ripped DVDs (that I purchased, of course).  And yet others I use for transferring large amounts of data between machines.  Whatever the use might be, I have found it very practical to physically label my drives.  I have given these external hard drive labels the following attributes, as you can see below:

• Drive name
• Capacity
• Format
• Contents (optional)

What’s in a name?

This might seem a little out of the “ordinary”, but I give unique and distinct names to my external drives.  This way, I can call a drive by name and automatically know the purpose that it serves in my digital life.  Moreover, naming my drives and then putting those names physically on them lets my friends and family know exactly which drive to take out of my “tech drawer” when it comes time to watch a movie or when I call home asking to be sent a specific file that’s stored on a specific drive.  (I usually don’t take all of my drives with me, so let’s hope that this is a rare occasion.

The moral of the story is that if you have a multitude of external storage devices and want to easily remember what’s on each drive, give your drives unique names and physically label them.

PS: the physical labeling part is a temporary solution, of course, until technologies like embedded e-ink get to be mainstream.  Until then, I can dream of displays like these taking the place of my Avery sticky labels.

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iBook G4 Surgery

This one falls under the “extreme geek” category: a few months ago I decided to replace the hard drive in my 2004 oldie-but-goody Apple iBook.  The iBook shipped with a 60GB standard Apple drive (probably a Hitachi).  With all the podcasts, music, and video I have been acquiring lately, the need for more storage presented itself in a similar fashion that a running deer presents himself to unsuspecting drivers when the creature runs across 8 lanes of the interstate.  I downloaded and printed the iBook hard drive replacement instructions and screw guides from iFixit.com, an excellent DIY site that has instructions and tips for projects from how to replace an iPod battery to any Mac-related project. Read more »