Archive for June, 2008

How to Embed High Quality Youtube Videos

June 27th, 2008

All of you folks must know about the new feature in youtube that allows you to watch some certain videos in high quality. But do you know how to embed those high quality youtube videos into your site? If not then continue reading to find out.

Its not at all complicated. You just need to add a couple of things to the code given to you by youtube. Now lets look at a sample code for embedding a youtube video:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/AYxu_MQSTTY”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/AYxu_MQSTTY” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Now all you need to do is add the following to the end of the video URL wherever it appears

&ap=%2526fmt%3D18

So if you did add the code correctly, your code will look like this:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/AYxu_MQSTTY&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/AYxu_MQSTTY&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

And your done!
Just remember though that this will work with only those videos that are available in high resolution on youtube. So do check to see if they are available in high quality before applying this alteration to the code.

Google Trends for Websites provides Detailed Traffic Statistics

June 27th, 2008

Google Trends for Websites is a new project of Google Labs that provides detailed traffic statistics based on searches made through the google search engine. It provides a service quite similar to that of Alexa, which has been heavily criticized by webmasters as being too inaccurate. Alexa bases its rankings on the statistics it gathers through its Alexa Toolbar, so if a visitor visits your site with the alexa toolbar installed only then will it be counted as a hit. This ofcourse makes it quite unaccurate. Google Trends for Websites however is based on provide rankings and traffic statistics based on searches and clicks made through the google search engine, which in my opinion makes it more of a reliable tool.

Here is an image of comparing traffics from Facebook and Myspace:

Google Trends Detailed Traffic Statistics

And the following is an image taken from Alexa:

Detailed Traffic Statistics from Alexa
Well, the overall shape of the two graphs seem to be almost the same but on closer examination you will see the difference. For example the point of intersection has quite a different timeline. Google Trends for Websites intersects the graphs between October 2007 and January 2008 whereas the Alexa graph intersects them at April 2008. So there is definitely a huge difference there. And its up to you to judge which one is correct. :)
Also, google does not show the daily amount of visitors to the sites. It is only good for comparing if you know the traffic for one of the sites. Say you know your daily traffic and you want to find the traffic for your competitor. Just plug in both the sites and use the difference in heights to estimate the amount of traffic received by your competitor. Anyways, I like this new tool from google and will be using it frequently in the future for my web projects. Lets see how popular it becomes!

I am back to blogging

June 27th, 2008

Hi guys. My exams finally finished last week and now am free. And I intend to keep a good posting frequency so 2 to 3 posts daily is my target. Lets see how it goes.

And to my surprise I haven’t lost much subscribers during this long break. :)
Thanks to all the subscribers!