Yesterday saw London celebrate the start of the Year of the Tiger in China Town, Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square. Luckily the weather reports for the most part were wrong, and we managed to miss the majority of any heavy rain or sleet and were free to wonder around without fear of my camera equipment getting wet!
However, even with the luck with the weather, there was just too many people and too few things going on for the day to be a great success, nevertheless however, below are a few photos and a video of the fireworks which ended the day.
Last weekend saw the annual MCN Motorcycle Show arrive into town at the ExCel Center in London. Aswell as displaying the latest bikes and accessories from all the top bike manufacturers, the MCN Babe of the Year contest was also counting down to the final; where out of hundreds of applicants, who were whittled down by modelling agency CT, just six took to the stage in a chance to win a year’s modelling contract and be the face of MCN for the next year.
All weekend, visitors to the event had the chance to phone in and vote for their favourite, however, there could only be one winner; who was Georgia Graham pictured below shortly after being crowned Babe of the Year 2010;
When asked what it would mean to win; Georgia, 20, from Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland said; “I was bullied as school for being ugly, so I want to prove the bullies wrong by winning”. See the rest of the post for more photos of the winner and runners-up.
With so much of our time and lives spent online these days using sites such as Facebook, Twitter & Flickr for example, you do sometimes wonder what would ever happen to all your data if one of these services suddenly dropped off the face of the earth? Granted, its highly unlikely that they would, or that they would lose all your data – but for that one in a billion chance there is a solution!
Backupify (www.backupify.com) is a service which I came across about a month ago which offers to backup all of your online data from a whole variety of online services with little to no effort from us. After setting up the initial options and account settings, it will happily do it’s thing every day while you sit back and forget about it. I’m currently using the service to backup my Twitter, Flickr and this very WordPress blog – I could setup more, but just havn’t yet.
And what’s more, if you sign up by February 15th 2010 – you can take advantage of their current offer and get a premium account for free, so it’s worth joining even simply to check it out and decide if its the right thing for you, especially as it’s currently free!
Over the past couple days I’ve been discovering a couple new additions and changes to Google Analytics which I wasn’t aware of which I’ll mention below;
Annotations
Perhaps the biggest update I’ve noticed; you can now annotate graphs in Google Analytics so you can note anything which may have happened at that time, such as website downtime which could have affected your stats – so in 6 months time when you go back to look at your stats, you can be reminded of why there is a blip the graph.
Simply click on a date on the graph, and a pop-up box appears where you can now Create a new annotation. Couldn’t be simpler!
This could be very useful for people who often analyise old statistics, and what’s even better – you can make the annotations private, or if you are on a shared account (for example for work purposes), you can share the annotation with everyone else who has an account so all your collegues can also see the information.
Asynchronous Tracking
A new method of tracking stats on your site has also been released which optimises how your browser loads the Google ga.js file, minimising any negative impact on user experience and allowing you to have the tracking code higher on your webpage.
More info can be found over at Google about this one and how to implement it here
Mobile Visitors
Secondly, under ‘Visitors’, Google have now seperated out the stats of visitors who use mobile devices. Quite handy if you want to analyise mobile visitors on their own without other browsers affecting the results.
Network Location
Last but not least, a very minor tweak but deserves a mention – a couple weeks ago the ‘Network Location’ section (which I seem to alway use!) was renamed ‘Service Providers’ – nothing more than just a name change!
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