Geeks for Christ

There are limos and there are limos and then there is the presidential limo (I should make that Presidential). This is the one that will carry the new president and, believe me, it is not like other limos.

Known in the Secret Service as “The Beast,” the customized Cadillac limousine is thought to be built on General Motors’ hefty 2500-series truck chassis. The Secret Service, of course, does not give you a spec sheet or much other information on The Beast, other than to say a new one is being put in service for Barack Obama.

There are some glimmers of information, however, in a New York Times piece by Gregg D. Merksamer, who says he has spent 30 years studying and writing about presidential cars, part of a class called “professional cars,” which also includes hearses and ambulances. Suffice to say that the limo is essentially a gussied-up and lavishly comfortable armored personnel carrier with, it is rumored, five-inch-thick windows and armor plating throughout.

One of the things that website owners want to know is how many visitors come to visit your website. A simple way of doing this is to add a widget like the one on this site called Live FeedJit. It is actually really easy to add to your website or blog, all you do is copy the code that they give you into the location where you want on your website. The only problem about tracking users this way is that the user can remove their IP address from being tracked. So for example let’s say that someone from Kansas visits your website, all they have to do is remove their IP from the Live feed and instead of saying specifically where they are from, it will only say that they came from the United States. So it really does not help for accurate demographics, especially if you want to somehow target visitors from a particular area like Kansas.

This is where a really neat program comes in, a program I have been using for several years, Google analytics. This is a more robust program to use for your website. Again it’s very easy to use, all you do is put the code before the “</body>” tag. As soon as you do this it will begin to track detailed information about your users. With this information you can run detailed reports on your visitors.

For example, let’s say you wanted to know how many visitors you have coming from Kansas and what times of the day they visit, plus what are they viewing. Well all you have to do is run a report with those criteria and you will have a really nice report with this information. Another neat thing is, suppose that you have a members only section on your website that is password protected. You can run a report to see if multiple users are sharing the same login, this is really important, expecially if you have information that you only want certain people to see.

If you have a different product that you use, please share it with the rest of us.