Towse: views from the hill

Those of you spot the tweets over >>> there will notice that I was having problems with e-mail and Usenet connectivity since yesterday.

What changed?

After much poking and what not, here’s what needed changing. I’m putting it here so I can find it again should the situation pop up.

Error msgs indicated that comcast mail connection refused as was pop.gmail. Wassup with that?

Being as I send mail to my personal accounts both to comcast.net and to a gmail account as backup, I could still read my e-mails.

As an aside … turns out =still= that about 10% of mail sent to comcast.net lands in some sys$null in comcastland. The mail that is picked up from the gmail account is more complete. I check the comcast.net bin every once in a bit in case someone sent e-mail directly to the comcast.net account. Usually the only source of mail sent directly to the comcast.net account is comcast itself.

I use the gmail account when I’m “wandering”. …
When I’m “home,” Tbird grabs the gmail account POP mail and puts it in my local folder.

SOLN: (hours later): for whatever reason thunderbird.exe was no longer on McAfee’s goodguy list. Add thunderbird.exe to the goodguy list maintained by McAfee’s firewall.

That cleared some of the problems, but next up: pop.gmail.com timed out.

SOLN: the word from gmail. Simply put: Use port 995. Have SSL set.

So what happened ‘twixt then and now? I’m not sure. I suspect the problems with the McAfee firewall are connected with an update they pushed yesterday. I have no idea where the port/SSL problems with gmail came from. Maybe I fiddled things around while I was trying to make things work earlier today and forgot to set things back where they were. Happens.

Update: Outgoing mail wasn’t going out this morning. (You can tell how much e-mail =I= send.) Had to set the port for smtp.comcast.net to 587. Comcast.net blocks the default port: 25.

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Having fun with Google Analytics.

I set up Google Analytics for Internet Resources for Writers the other day. Picked up my little bit of code from Google and added it to every page on the site.

I only have two days’ worth of stats so far, but I’ve found out that 18% of my traffic comes from search engines, 32.5% comes from direct hits and the other 49.5% comes from links on other sites. Turns out of the 242 visits in the last two days, ninety of them came via stumbleupon. 37%!

I have a 60% bounce rate (meaning the visitor hit one page and left), which is sucky if you’re trying to sell somebody something, but if someone wants a bit of information, finds it on the first page they look at and leaves, that’s cool with me.

And if someone doesn’t find what they’re looking for (like the person who came via a search engine search for /dental office supplies free printable photos/), well, that’s cool too. (I had to do that search to see if I really show up. I do! #4 on the returned hits!)

Other fun features of Google Analytics include a pretty map showing visitors’ locations.