Frequently Asked Questions

Ah, the ever-common FAQ. We'll be adding to this as we receive questions. If you find something and need an answer, please e-mail us at admin at pythia-analytics.com.

Your graphs doesn't work in IE 6. What are you, amateurs!?

You need to change a security setting in Internet Explorer 6. In the menu bar at the top of your browser, click Tools. Then click Internet Options. Click the Security tab. Finally, click Custom Level. Scroll down to Active X Controls And Plug Ins and change Binary Behaviors to Disable. Close and restart your browser.

We'd like to thank folks at Microsoft for making this such a simple change (sarcasm). If you can, upgrade to IE 7, or even better, install Mozilla Firefox.

Are you going to show everyone my data? Why isn't there a password or anything?

All of the data collected by Pythia - even data collected for upgraded domains - is freely available on the internet. Pythia is strictly a matter of convenience: We collect it all, and create pretty charts, so you don't have to.

We therefore don't use passwords or other security for domain data.

However, we take the security of your billing data very seriously. We do not keep your credit card data, and we only use PayPal for payment processing. If you keep your credit card out of the hands of disgruntled food service employees, we'll do our part.

Why is www.mysite.com different from mysite.com? It's a pain in the butt.

To search engines and other computer-driven search tools (like Technorati), they're different. This is called 'canonicalization'. So, Yahoo might show 200 links for 'www.yoursite.com' and 400 links for 'yoursite.com'. This is very valuable information - you're always better off consolidating all of these links under a single canonical domain. If you see a difference between the two, it's time to talk to an SEO specialist. Or just set up a 301 redirect from one domain to the other, if you know what that means.

What's an inlink?

An 'inlink' is one link pointing at your site, from either your site or another. Inlinks are a great measure of your popularity. Plus, they can help you improve your search rankings. So inlinks going up is a good thing. Inlinks going down is a bad thing.

What's a Technorati?

Technorati.com is a major blog aggregator. Think of them as a blog search engine. We grab links from them using their advanced programming interface, or API. Folks who add their blogs to the Technorati index also provide data regarding who they link to. Technorati totals that data up, and provides it to us via their API.

What's a Blogline?

Bloglines.com is one of many web-based feedreader services. You can create your own home page of sorts, and have fast access to stuff you want to keep track of.

What's a Del.icio.us?

Del.icio.us is a bookmarking service that lets you store and tag your bookmarks, online. It keeps track of the total bookmarks for any given site. We collect that data and show it in Pythia.

Why no Google data?

Google's terms of service don't allow us to 'scrape' their site for the data we need, and they no longer provide a way to programmatically collect link and page count data. We've contacted Google and will hopefully hear back. Someday...

Why do some of my graphs look weird?

Sometimes you'll see a graph with nothing on it. This can happen for two reasons: First, you might have 'zero' values for all dates. In that case, the graphing script won't show anything. Second, you may have the same value, albeit a non-zero one, for all dates.

We're working on a better way to handle this.

Will the free part of Pythia always be free?

That's the plan. We may eventually start asking for donations, or placing simple advertisements to pay the way, but that which is currently free will hopefully stay that way.

Will search ranking tracking ever be free?

Nope. Rank tracking requires a bit of extra work on our part, plus an additional server. And it eats up bandwidth as we determine your rankings. Sorry, it'll always cost. Plus, we have kids to put through college.

Will you ever have an account console, so I can manage my domains?

We're planning to, if Pythia turns out to be relatively successful. If Pythia doesn't earn enough to keep us in Scotch and scones, though, we'll likely stick with the current setup (hint hint).

How did you build this?

We used ColdFusion, SQL Server and a fantastic graphing tool called ejschart. This site, from concept to launch, took two weeks to build.