Axe Software Blog

The new version of AVG is causing some problems for web statistics tools such as Xlogan, as it automatically scans Google search results even if the user never visits your site.

This results in artificially increased statistics for your pages. See The Register article for more information.

Fortunately these fake hits are (currently) easy to filter out in Xlogan. Just click Filter, then tick “Raw log text”. Select “doesn’t contain” and enter “;1813″ in the text box.

This filtering works because the scanner currently uses a fixed User-Agent string ”Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)”, so it is quite easy to detect these fake hits at the moment.

In my case, for this site I found the effect wasn’t too high. Only around 0.01% of the bandwidth used came from these fake AVG hits, and the total number of visitors was skewed again by only 0.01%.

The biggest effect of the fake hits was causing Xlogan to over-estimate the proportion of users using IE6 and Windows XP, as these elements also appear in the fake User-Agent string. On this site, before filtering, Xlogan reported that 63.4% of users were using Windows XP, and 31.6% were using IE6. The actual figures, as calculated when using the filter, were 61.2% for Windows XP and 27.4% for IE6.

Quest 4.03 is now available.If you’ve already got Quest or Quest Pro, the easiest way to update is by selecting “Check for updates” from the “Help” menu in Quest or QDK. If you’re not already a user, you can download Quest from http://www.axeuk.com/quest/

Here’s what’s new:

QDK

• The Script Editor’s functions are now available from a menu (with keyboard shortcuts) as well as from the toolbar.
• Added “Allow players to use abbreviated object names” game option.
• Slightly increased the size of the Object Type box to display correctly in Windows Vista.
• If QCompile is launched from QDK and fails to compile the file, it now displays error information.
• Fixed bugs:
  • a run-time error occurred when removing a synonym.
  • double-clicking a script line in the Script Editor would cause it to be changed.

Quest

• The command entry box now uses the same font and fontsize as the game.
• You can now turn off the player’s ability to use abbreviated object names, by adding “abbreviations off” to the “define options” block.
• Quest now writes an error to the ASL log if an internal error occurs while running a script command, instead of quitting with an error message.
• Fixed bugs:
  • fixed run-time error when opening some large games.
  • fixed problem where “if” statements of the form “if … then if … and/or … then …” would be processed incorrectly.
  • QCompile wouldn’t add a WAV file to a CAS if the playwav command did not include the file extension.
  • a run-time error would occur if the “clone” command was used in an object’s “action” script.

The 2007 Interactive Fiction competition (IFComp) has begun, and the 29 games are available for download.

There is one Quest entry this year, though I do recommend you check out all of the games as they’ll give you a good idea of the kinds of things people are doing via the medium of text adventure games.

Here’s a good blog post about online advertising: The Devil & Online Advertising

There’s some good advice here about measuring a website’s advertising worth - useful information whether you’re looking to put some ads on your site, or if you’re thinking about becoming an advertiser.

Putting advertising on your site

If you want to put ads on your site, you’ll need a good idea of who your visitors are, and how many you get. This will help you to choose the right advertising network for you, and should give you some idea about the amount of money you can make.

Looking at the search terms people use to find your site is a good start. You may be surprised at the things people are searching for, and it will help you to understand who your visitors are and what they want. Depending on the advertising or affiliate network you use, you may be able to choose ads and products that are more relevant to your visitors.

Also, take a look at how many times each of your pages is viewed (Xlogan’s Files Report can tell you this). If you’re in a hurry, you can devote your time adding advertising to the pages that get viewed most often.

Using online advertising to increase visitors

Of course, the other side of the coin is creating advertising yourself to put on other sites and search engines, to increase traffic to your own site.

Google AdWords is a good place to start, as you can very cheaply try out different ads to see if they work for you.  You’ll want to carefully measure your conversion rate, however, to ensure your ads are worth the money. You probably don’t want to spend $100 on advertising to make one $20 sale!

Quest 4.02 is now available.

If you’ve already got Quest or Quest Pro, the easiest way to update is by selecting “Check for updates” from the “Help” menu in Quest or QDK. If you’re not already a user, you can download Quest from http://www.axeuk.com/quest/

This release fixes a few minor bugs in Quest and QDK, including a few issues with Windows Vista.