Visio Talk

Alexa is a number of things. It is a toolbar first and foremost, which provides the user with some interesting statistics about a web site. Like the number of other sites that link to the site, and it shows a measure of the traffic flow to the site.

The measure of traffic flow is what Alexa is most famous for, and is published in a number format, like the in the badge on the left hand sidebar of my blog, here. The lower the number the higher the traffic. It represents a rank. So, the site ranked number one, has the most traffic on the web.

There is a prize for the first person to email me the name of the number 1 site!

The catch with Alexa is that the traffic is only measured based on people who have the Alexa toolbar installed. And although that is a very LARGE number of users, it is still therefore not an accurate reflection of a sites true traffic flow. And it is biassed toward tech savvy readers, and sites that cater for that kind of reader.

One of the other interesting things that my wife and I found when we first started fixing up our house, which we are approaching like an investment property/property development project was termites.

We were aware when we bought the property that there was a bit of a termite issue (and it was one of the factors we were able to leverage to drive the price right down.. everyone hates termites and if you have got them they are going to turn almost every buyer away.. is what we said..)

But, they are really not a huge issue, I like termite exterminators in Austin, TX personally, but there are loads of good local providers, and I recommend going with a local group. Just because I like to support local business. You just need to get them out of the house, and then you need to have a monitoring system in place to protect against re-visiting.

If you catch them early (which is the idea of the monitoring.. we pay around $500 a year) then they cannot do much damage, it is a serious problem when they are left for years.

For any that have not heard yet your Alexa ranking is about to get a nice little boost. For a long time now the Alexa toolbar has not been available to Firefox users. But, that is about to change with the release of the eloquently named Alexa Toolbar for Firefox. So, now you will get credit for all your non Internet Explorer hits against your Alexa rank. If you have not already download it here.