I've mentioned top commentator before, it's going to be a website that acts as a control centre for commenting on other blogs of interest. It's easy to get carried away reading blogs and as it's something I do anyway, I thought I may as well try and get some links back to the top commentator site by dropping a comment or two when I'm reading other people's blog.

photo credit: premasagar

Anyway, this one has been on the back burner for too long. If you check out the sidebar on the right hand side you'll see a countdown timer indicating that TopCommentator.com should be launching in about 5 days times. Well I've started work on this site today and plan on completing it ahead of schedule. The main objective of this project is to use the site as a base for commenting on other blogs and it's essential to complete the site and get working on this sooner rather than later. The design of the site and ideas for the content we develop can evolve over time, but for now the main thing is to get it out there and see how the project kicks off! I'd normally be hesistant to go public with a site without having much content up on it but for this one we'll be sticking around on other peoples blogs for a while so I'm sure they'll keep coming back to the site every now and again to have another look anyway!

I've teamed up with Sean MacEntee on this project and we're taking the launch date forward to the 1st of August. That leaves us kicking off on a new month with zero visits and we'll be updating the site with monthly stats to check the progress. So check out TopCommentator.com later this week to see how it looks.

I installed Google Analytics a while back. When I launched my new blog theme a few days ago, I've since realised that I overwrote all the files for my theme and therefore replaced the Google Analytics code. I don't know if many people have made this mistake before, but it took me a few days to pick up on what I'd done. My Google Analytic stats weren't rising and I knew there was something wrong as I was checking my AWS stats that I installed as part of my hosting plan and this blog actually had it's best day of traffic since I started out. So this is just something to be aware of, if you're updating your WordPress theme. Yeah I know I'm spending lots of time looking at stats but I'll be making more of an effort to boost traffic very soon so it's something I need to be looking at.

photo credit: richardmasoner

It's easiest just to place the Google Analytics code in footer.php as the footer shows up on every page and therefore this tracks all hits on your website. There's a nice article on exactly what to do over at ThemePlayground.com. It cleared things up for me as I previously thought I needed to put the Google Analytics code in a few different files, but it turns out that footer.php is the only place it needs to go! If you're using WordPress, there's lots of other nice tips on ThemePlayground and I'll be checking back there for a few tips and tricks as I continue to update this site.