Alexa adalah sebuah web service yang menghitung traffic dari suatu web/blog berdasarkan jumlah kunjungan ke web/blog tersebut. Alexa menghitung traffic rangkings dengan menganalisa jutaan pengguna Toolbar Alexa dan data yang diperoleh dari berbagai macam traffic data. Informasi tersebut di sortir, disaring, dan dihitung dan ditampilkanlah ranking yang didapatkan tadi pada Alexa service. Prosesnya cukup rumit, tetapi bila loe pengen tahu lebih dalam , teruskan membaca
Apa Itu Traffic Rank?
Traffic rank didasarkan pada kumpulan data historis traffic tiga bulanan dari jutaan pengguna Alexa toolbar dan didapatkan dari berbagai macam sumber data, dan dikombinasikan dengan page views dan kunjungan user. Pada tahap awal, Alexa menghitung reach dan jumlah page views dari semua situs pada web secara harian. Alexa traffic rank yang sesungguhnya berdasarkan nilai yang berasal dari rata-rata jumlah kedua variabel tersebut sepanjang waktu (jadi ranking suatu website/blog mencerminkan jumlah pengunjung situs/blog dan jumlah halaman yang dikunjugin oleh pengguna). Perubahan tiga bulan tersebut ditentukan dengan membandingkan ranking situs/blog sekarang dengan ranking dari tiga bulan yang lalu. Contohnya, pada tanggal 1 Juli, perubahan tiga bulanan akan menampilkan perbedaan antara rangking berdasarkan jumlah traffic selama kuartal pertama tahun 2008 dan rangking berdasarkan jumlah traffic selama kuartal kedua tahun yang sama.
Apa itu Situs dan Web Hosting?
Traffic dihitung untuk situs, yang berarti diperuntukkan untuk level domain. Contohnya, hosting web www.msn.com, carpoint.msn.com dan slate.msn.com semuanya dinggap sebagai bagian dari situs yang sama, karena berada pada domain yang sama yaitu msn.com. Pengecualian untuk blog atau personal home pages, yang dianggap terpisah jika dapat diidentifikasi secara otomatis dari URL-nya. Situs seperti mirror juga dinggap sebagai situs yang sama.
Apa itu Reach?
Reach mengukur jumlah pengunjung. Reach secara khusus didefinisikan sebagai persentase dari seluruh pengguna internet yang mengunjungi suatu situs/blog. Sebagai contoh, jika situs yahoo.com memiliki persentase reach sejumlah 28%, artinya Seluruh pengguna internet secara global yang diukur oleh Alexa sebanyak 28% mengunjungi yahoo.com. Alexa reach per minggu dan rata-rata per tiga bulan diukur berdasarkan reach harian, rata-rata dari suatu waktu tertentu. Perubahan tiga bulanan ditentukan dengan membandingkan jumlah kunjungan saat ini dari suatu situs dengan nilai pada tiga bulan yang lalu.
Apa itu Page Views?
Page views mengukur jumlah halaman yang dikunjungin oleh pengunjung. Berapapun banyaknya halaman yang dikunjungin oleh pengunjung yang sama pada hari yang sama dihitung sebagai satu kali kunjungan. Page views dari satu orang pengunjung merupakan rata-rata jumlah halaman unik yang dikunjungin per pengguna per hari pada suatu situs. Perubahan tiga bulanan ditentukan dengan membandingkan jumlah page view sekarang dengan jumlah pada tiga bulan yang lalu.
Bagaimana Perhitungan dari Grafik Trend Traffic?
Grafik trend menunjukkan rata-rata perubahan ranking per tiga hari. Traffic harian mencerminkan traffic dar isitus/blog berdasarkan data harian. Berbeda dengan traffic rank yang ditunjukkan pada Toolbar Alexa dan dihitung berdasarkan data jumlah traffic selama tiga bulan.
Traffic ranking harian kadang-kadang memberikan manfaat kepada suatu situs/blog dengan traffic yang tinggi secara tiba-tiba, sedangkan traffic tiga bulanan memberikan manfaat kepada situs/blog dengan traffic yang konsisten sepanjang waktu. Semenjak Alexa menyadari bahwa traffic yang konsisten adalah indikasi yang lebih baik bagi suatu situs/blog, maka Alexa lebih memeilih rangking traffic tiga bulanan untuk menunjukkan tingkat popularitas suatu situs/blog secara keseluruhan. Alexa menggunakan traffic harian pada grafiknya karena dapat memberikan penggunanya gambaran mengenai fluktuasi traffic dengan lebih teliti.
Suatu situs/blog dapat saja lebih tinggi traffic rank-nya pada periode tiga bulanan dibandingkan rangking traffic harian pada garfik trend. Pada suatu hari tertentu bisa saja ada situs/blog yang mengalami lonjakan traffic sementara waktu. tetapi jika traffic situs/blog tersebut konsisten, dapat saja menghasilkan ranking yang bagus pada saat data traffic dikumpulkan pada rata-rata traffic per tiga bulanan. Analogi sederhana pada pertandingan golf yang dilaksanakan selama empat hari, jika pemain lain mengalami pertandingan yang baik pada hari pertama dan berada pada rangking pertama dan hari lainnya berfluktuasi, sedangkan loe secara konsisten selama 4 hari selalu berada pada rangking kedua, pada akhir pertandingan bisa aja loe yang memenangi turnamen.
Trus gimana caranya menaikkan ranking alexa ? ada nggak sih cara cepat agar ranking alexa cepat naik ? setelah blogwalking kesana-sini maka akhir dapat juga beberapa tips untuk menaikkan ranking alexa, berikut adalah beberapa tips dan cara menaikkan ranking alexa :
* Install Alexa toolbar di Browsermu
* Pasang Alexa Widget di web atau blog mu
* Gunakan URL situsmu sebagai signature di email
* Gabung di forum-forum yang ramai dan pasang URLmu sebagai signature
* Buat postingan yang menarik dan berguna bagi pembaca
* Kalo mo lebih ekstrim buat postingan yg kontroversial ( dijamin akan banyak traffik yg masuk he..he.. *gwa nggal tanggung akibatnya lho*)
* Install widget www.blogupp.com berdasarkan dari pengalaman widget tersebut juga berpotensi mendatangkan unique visitor
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Tentang Alexa Traffic Rankings
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Beware of debit card skimmers
Police in at least two cities advise consumers not to use their debit
card at a gas pump because there’s no way to be sure it hasn’t been
tampered with.
By Herb Weisbaum
MSNBC
Becki Turner got the call from her bank’s fraud department on Labor
Day. The investigator wanted to know if she had withdrawn $500 from an
ATM in California over the holiday weekend. She hadn’t. She couldn’t.
Turner was home in Puyallup, Wash.
“I was just flabbergasted,” she says. “I had the card with me, the ATM
was in another state, and the person using the machine had to have my
security code.” Turner worried crooks had gotten into the banking
system and stolen her password.
It wasn’t anything that complicated. Puyallup police say thieves
snagged her account information — along with the debit card numbers
and PIN codes of hundreds of other people — at two gas stations in the
area.
They did it by installing their own hard-to-spot card reader, called a
skimmer, on top of the card reader built into the pump. The skimmer is
able to grab the account information from the card without interfering
with the legitimate payment transaction.
The crooks used the stolen data to create (or clone) fake debit cards
that were used at ATMs in Washington State over the Fourth of July
weekend and in Northern California on Labor Day weekend. The bad guys
like three-day holidays because it gives them more time to use the
cards before the unauthorized withdrawals are spotted.
“We are looking at a sophisticated, very well-organized group of
individuals,” says Detective Jason Visnaw with the Puyallup Police
Department. When all the victims from these two incidents are
identified, the total loss could reach half a million dollars.
Why steal debit card numbers? “With a credit card you have to go and
buy merchandise and then you have to fence it or pawn it,” Det. Visnaw
explains. “With a debit card, you’re getting cash money.”
This is not an isolated case. Gas pumps are being compromised in
cities across the country. “We don’t view it as an epidemic, but there
are cases open in at least a half dozen states right now,” says Ed
Donovan, spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service. These investigations
are underway in California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Delaware and
Washington.
Donovan tells me the Secret Service believes some of these crimes are
inside jobs, involving someone at the service station.
Gas pumps are just the latest target
Skimming credit cards and debit cards is not new. Portable card
readers make it possible for anyone to copy the information stored on
a card’s magnetic stripe. This information is not encrypted so it’s
easy to steal.
“You just run it through the skimmer and it has all the information
right there in plain text,” says former White House cyber security
advisor Howard Schmidt. “It’s very easy to imprint that data on
another magnetic strip and use it somewhere else.”
The first skimming cases were reported at restaurants and stores where
dishonest employees ran cards through their reader before ringing up
the sale. As technology improved, the bad guys developed skimmers for
ATMs. Now they’ve added gas pumps.
The skimmers are designed to slip over the real card reader. They can
be hard to spot. And quite frankly, most of us would never look for
something like this anyway. We want to pay and go.
So how do they get your PIN number? They can hide a little camera in
the skimmer or on the pump. It shows your fingers as you type in the
number.
There are also fake keypads that slip over the real keypad that can
transmit the PIN code as you enter it.
In Las Vegas, police have discovered even more sophisticated
technology – wireless transmitters installed inside the pump. “They
can actually sit in the parking lot with a laptop and get real-time
information as victims use their card,” explains Lt. Robert Sebby of
the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Because there’s nothing
on the outside of the pump, there’s no way you can tell the pump is
compromised.
Not a safe way to pay
Nancy and Jim Tew no longer use their debit cards to pay at the pump —
and for good reason. They both had their debit card numbers stolen at
one of those gas stations in Puyallup, Wash.
Nancy Tew found out about the theft when her card was rejected at the
grocery store. “To my astonishment, I had no money in the bank,” she
said.
The thieves used her account number at ATMs in Hollywood, Calif., to
steal $600. They got $900 from her husband’s checking account. She
tells me it was “totally bizarre and really scary” to be targeted like
that and not even know it.
The Tews now pay for their gas — with cash or debit card — at the
register. That may sound paranoid, but other victims of this skimming
attack tell me they now do the same thing.
Police in Puyallup and Las Vegas now advise residents not to use their
debit card at a gas pump because there’s no way to be sure it hasn’t
been tampered with.
That’s smart advice and here’s why. Debit cards do not offer the same
fraud protection as credit cards. If crook armed with a skimmer snags
your credit card number and uses it to buy things, you can dispute the
charges with the credit card company. You won’t owe a thing while they
investigate.
If the crook grabs your debit card number, he can go to a cash machine
and pull money out of your checking account. It could take days for
the bank to investigate and put that money back into your account.
During that time checks could bounce or you might not be able to pay
your bills. That’s why the only way I pay at the pump is with a credit
card.
FTP Using a Shell Script
Manually transferring a file or files via FTP is a common and convenient method for moving data from one computer to another, especially if it’s a non-recurring event. But the reality is there are many times when an event is recurring and calls for immediate automation. This can be done by using a simple UNIX script file, which can then be executed via command line interface or added to the crontab. In the shell script, myftp.sh, example below, I'm FTP’ing binary type files (pictures) from a local computer to a remote while logging the activity.
Note: Some organizational policies may not allow login/password information in a script file.
# vi myftp.sh
#! /bin/sh
REMOTE='esoft'
USER='anyuser'
PASSWORD='myftp125'
FTPLOG='/tmp/ftplog'
date >> $FTPLOG
ftp -n $REMOTE <<_FTP>>$FTPLOG
quote USER $USER
quote PASS $PASSWORD
bin
cd /myraid/dailyjpgs
mput *.jpg
quit
_FTP
:wq!
Run via CLI
# ./myftp.sh
Add it to the crontab
# crontab -e
Alternate post: FTP Using One-Liner and Perl Script
Per commenter's request: (call login and password outside of script)
# cat > /export/ftp/.user.txt
anyuser
control+d
# cat > /export/ftp/.passwd.txt
myftp125
control+d
# vi myftp.sh
#! /bin/sh
REMOTE='esoft'
USER=`cat /export/ftp/.user.txt`
PASSWORD=`cat /export/ftp/.passwd.txt`
FTPLOG='/tmp/ftplog'
date >> $FTPLOG
ftp -n $REMOTE <<_FTP>>$FTPLOG
quote USER $USER
quote PASS $PASSWORD
bin cd /myraid/dailyjpgs
mput *.jpg
quit
_FTP
:wq!
Install a Solaris Boot Block
Here is a convenient procedure to know for Solaris 8 and below. Usually after a / partition recovery, I use it to install a server's or workstation's boot block. For most people, the second argument is a little difficult to remember. Here is an example.
ok boot cdrom -s
# /usr/sbin/installboot /usr/platform/`uname -i`/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s0
need to be /usr/sbin/installboot
from a Solaris 10 dvd
/usr/sbin/installboot /usr/platform/`uname -i`/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s0
Sun email servers
The other day I found a secret hidden feature of the email server we use internally in Sun. If you log in to the email erver using the web interface, then you select one of your folders and hit the "share" button, it will give some properties of the folder. One of these properties is: "allow direct delivery".
So if I enable it, someone could send email to quenelle+somefolder@sun.com and the email would get directly deposited in ./somefolder in my imap tree. This short-circuits the need for me to add a bazillion filters to the server. (One for each alias I'm on) Instead, I could subscribe to the alias using the address of quenelle+IN/alias-name@sun.com and the mail for that alias would go in ./IN/alias-name.
So adding a new filter for each alias isn't THAT much of a problem, but I can never seem to get it just right. I could resolve it by writing my own custom scripts and uploading them to the server with ldap-write, but that's way more work than I want.
Here's my current annoyance.
My normal setup sends aliases to separate folders, using server-side filters. And email that has my name on it also goes direct to my inbox. Seems simple, right? For mail that only goes to me, it works. For email that only goes to the alias it works. What about mail that is addressed to both me and an alias? What I see coming into my inbox is two copies of a message, each one with both addresses in it (me and the alias).
The server only supports simple rules like: match X: send to Y. So I tell it to match my name and copy to my inbox. And I tell it to match the alias and copy to the alias folder. The result is that for any email to an alias and to me, I get two copies in the folder and two copies in my inbox.
My theory is that if the server directly deposits alias email into the folder, then I'll only see one copy going past my mail filters, and I'll be able to get one copy in my inbox and one copy in the folder (when I get double-addressed email)
Now I just need to find some time to play wth it.
I wish the Roller software would get a built-in editor as good as blogger.com. I have to resort to raw text now, and I'm getting very good at typeing paragraph open/close tags by hand.
