Ever wonder what your email behavior looks like on a graph? Because if you have, we've good news for some of you -- well, those of you that use Gmail. Google coder Mihai Parparita just released a Python program called Mail Trends, which can show you various graphs of data extracted from your email account. You can examine your email behavior from various angles:

• Distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week and time of day
• Distribution of messages by size and your top 40 largest messages
• The top senders, recipients and mailing lists you're on.
• Distributions of senders, recipients and mailing lists over time
• The distribution of thread lengths and the lists and people that result in the longest threads

If you don't use Gmail, fear not. The plan is to eventually release a version that works with other email services, though it is unknown when that version will see the light of day.

[via Googlified]

School is in session. Your website is the pupil, and Website Grader is the teacher, its time to let this seo tool measure your online marketing successes or failures.

Website Grader is a search engine optimization tool that analyzes websites to see if they are up to scratch with search terms, and ensures online marketing effectiveness. Website Grader takes into account traffic, social ranking, Technorati ranks, Google Page Rank, Alexa ranks, inbound links, delicious bookmarks and pages indexed in Google to provide a comprehensive look at what websites have been up to. The system analyzes meta keywords, page descriptions, domain registration information, headings, images, the last time it was crawled by Google, and how many RSS subscriptions in Bloglines and grades it accordingly out of 100.

Website Grader is a great tool to check in with what websites have been up to, (or as a competition review) but take this information with a grain of salt, as some areas like Google Page Rank were showing up as 0 for Download Squad.

Understanding where your traffic is coming from is one of the major components to being able to optimize content for a better experience for users. Having a good analytics package is key, whether its Google's free Analytics or a visually stimulating package like CrazyEgg. Throw some confetti on it, and what do you get?

CrazyEgg is well known for their visual approach to analytics. Their free offering makes its easy for website owners to get a quick look at where visitors are clicking and how they are navigating through a website with the use of heatmaps, overlays, and now with some confetti. With the analytical Confetti view, users get a better understanding how visitors interact with their website. Visitor interaction can be sorted based on referrers, search terms, operating systems, browser, time before clicks and window size in a colorful easy to understand view.

Crazy Egg is a free analytics service, with an upgrade package available. Installation is through a simple javascript line added to webpages that you want to track.

I'm a small-time web developer/tinkerer, and the occasion is not rare that I need to poke around in the HTTP traffic itself to debug some particularly stick problem. There are some lightweight ways to get the job done most of the time, in particular the excellent LiveHTTPHeaders add-on for Firefox, but once in awhile I need something a bit more robust. On the other hand, there's tools like Ethereal that, though robust, are perhaps too robust. What's needed is something in the middle, like HTTPLook. It's a free Windows app that does one thing and one thing only: Sniff out your HTTP traffic and show it to you in a robust, easy-to-navigate way. To get started, you just have to click on the green Start button, and HTTPLook will record all of the HTTP traffic on your system, in and out, until you click on Stop. After that you can search among the traffic, annotate the data with notes, view or edit entities (e.g. downloaded images or HTML files), and, perhaps most useful of all, filter the data by hosts, return codes (404, 500, etc.), content types, and header fields. On top of that, HTTPLook's help files come with a complete HTTP header reference. If you use HTTPLook, I highly recommend switching to a two-pane mode that will show you both the request and response side by side.

Update: Reader Qwfwq points out that the HTTPLook download is a 15-day trial and it seems no longer possible to purchase the registered version. Big oversight on my part. Reader Peter suggests Fiddler, which is a lot like HTTPLook, has some nice-looking add-ons, and is definitely free.