New Lens

I'm pretty excited. Tomorrow my new Nikon lens arrives. I purchased a Nikon 18-200 VR. From everything I've heard, it's a great all-in-one lens. All of the articles I've read have pointed to the fact that this is a lens that you rarely take off your camera. I bought it at Pictureline (pictureline.com).

I can't wait to get it.

By the way the Nikon 18-135 lens is as horrible as all of the reviews state. It broke within a year. Don't buy it.

Goal Tracking - New Year's Resoutions

I believe it was Mark Twain who said that at the beginning of a new year "is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual."

This year, as usual, we sat down with a family to figure out what our New Year's resolutions are. It was interesting that each of my kids already had them in their minds: Be better at turning in homework; Get straight A's; Learn to do the splits; Learn to read chapter books; Learn to dance. It was good to get them to vocalize them. That's the first step. But the hardest part is yet to come. That's where I'm going to try out some new goal tracking software solution called joesgoals.com. It's easy. It's free. It seems effective.

Joesgoals.com has a lot of great reviews for quite a few credible sources and recently won an award from ChannelFlip. Give it a try for a month and post your comments on if it actually worked for you and how you achieve your goals in 2010. I'm anxious to hear your successes or failures. Good luck with your goal tracking.

Review of ClickHeat by LabsMedia

OK. I admit it. I could sit for hours and look at web stats and analytics, evaluating different patterns of behavior...following paths...seeing what is or isn't working... I just love to dig into the data.

I was introduced today to another analytic tool that will eat away at my weekends, HeatClick by LabsMedia: http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html.

Here's a sample ClickHeat image from a page off of one of my sites:

I know. It looks like a bunch of smudges. But what it's telling me are the popular places where people are clicking and where they are not clicking. It's even telling me where people rest their mouse when they're looking at my page (perhaps that's too much data). Anyway, from this you can tell what is and isn't working on each web page. It's a great visual indicator that I can't get from Google Analytics. In fact, it confirmed several suspicions I've had but couldn't validate until seeing it visually. I wouldn't ever use ClickHeat as my exclusive analytic source, but it's a great addition to my quiver of data tools.

To download ClickHeat which, by the way, is freeware, just click here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/clickheat/files/

I give this product an: A+
Download it today and recommend it to a friend!