apropos

I’m not as well versed in the English language as I would have liked to have been by my age (I’m 31 at the moment). I try to improve my understanding of grammar and my vocabulary on a sort of ad-hoc basis as I go through life, as I suppose many people do.

I’ve decided that from now on when I look up a word to confirm or learn its definition I will put a short article about it up here on my blog.

So to start, today I learned about the word apropos, which as an adverb means “on an unrelated note”, and as an adjective means essentially “appropriate” or “suitable”. At least, I hope that’s what it means. :)

Hopefully I’ll get many more new and interesting words up here in the future.

Peter Norvig: What to demand from a Scientific Computing Language

Doing some research on Peter Norvig (I’m fascinated by the guy and want to know what he thinks) and I found a talk of his: Peter Norvig: What to demand from a Scientific Computing Language. In the talk Peter explains what he wants out of a programming language and why he feels that Python fits the bill.

I watched the whole thing but I think I’ll put it on my TODO list to watch this again one day.

Direct, referral or organic traffic

Just trying to get my head around the ‘Direct’, ‘Referral’ and ‘Organic’ traffic classifications in Google Analytics. Basically ‘Direct’ is where there is no referrer header, e.g. user typed URL into address bar, clicked on link in email, etc. ‘Referral’ means some website referred the traffic, e.g. a link in an article on another website. ‘Organic’ means that one of a predefined set of search engines referred the traffic in response to a search.

Not sure how Google AdWords traffic is classified… I expect that would be ‘Referral’ as it’s not ‘Direct’ and not really ‘Organic’ either.

Online advertising and website popularity

I was doing some research into online advertising and found… nothing… swear!

Also I used alexa.com for the first time to get some reports on my domains, for example jsphp.co which is ranked 5,148,442 in the world.

I’d like to know what the average number of monthly visitors to all websites is (so I could know if my sites were more or less popular than the average website), but my search didn’t turn up any answers.

I bumped into this MLM scam guy too. He did mention one useful thing though: authorize.net, an online payment system.