A drawback I find with Google Analytics is that there are so many different reports you can get, and it’s not always immediately clear exactly how you can get to the report you want. Eventually, I found myself pulling up the same reports over and over, so I thought to myself… “self, wouldn’t it be great if I could just view all these reports on one screen?” So I kinda did just that, over the course of a few evenings. I had to do a few semi-tricky things with Google sessions and whatnot, but the end result is a somewhat generic Google Analytics library which pulls down reporting data. I then wrapped all this into a WordPress plugin. While doing the plugin wrapping process, I found that it was also pretty easy to pull down and incorporate reports from other services such as Feedburner. So this plugin displays reports pulled down from Google Analytics and Feedburner, and will possibly do some more in the future.

So there it is, now you can view Google Analytics and Feedburner reports right inside your WordPress admin area

Check it out: Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports plugin for WordPress

Here’s a screenshot if you’re curious:

PS: And if you’re a blogger and are not using WordPress (and have some PHP know-how), then you could still download the plugin and rework the Google Analytics library portion into a plugin for your own blogging system. Don’t ask me for help tho, you’re on your own for that

Anyways, I recently installed Google’s latest web service, Google Analytics, onto tantannoodles.com to give it a test run. It’s basically a web based statistics program for your web site. The verdict? Great tool to get indepth stats about your site for free, though it may not necessarily be the most easy to use tool (there are a lot of options!).

As with most statistic programs, it gives you all the basic web statistic reports. Like how many visitors and page views your site received over a period of time, where your visitors are coming from, or even slightly more in-depth reports such as what’s the percentage of new vs returning visitors. And it plots all these different reports in pretty pie chart graphs for you to look at. Any decent stats program worth it’s weight will be able to generate all these basic reports.

Now I haven’t really used any ‘enterprise’ statistics packages since they’re all kind of expensive (such as WebTrends), but what really sets Google Analytics apart from the other more mature open source packages (such as Analog or AWStats) is that it mashes up all the different kinds data it collects into what it calls “cross segment” reports, to give you some really interesting insights into your web site. For example, I can tell you that yesterday (11/27) 75% of visitors to tantannoodles.com were first time visitors, that is they never visited this site before. That’s sorta neat. What’s even neater is this next tidbit. Of these first time visitors, 36% of them came from the United States, 7% came from Canada, and 6% came from Singapore¹. Neat-o. And you can do this kind of cross referencing and drill down analysis on almost every kind of data that Google collects, along with the ability to compare reports for one time period with the reports for another. That is pretty cool.

Like I said, it’s not exactly the easiest tool to use, I had to spend a couple days trying to figure it out, but once you know how to generate all the different kinds reports, it becomes a very powerful and useful tool. Much like Google’s other services, the best part about Google Analytics is that it is completely free². That is, if your site gets less than 5 million pageviews per month. And if your site is getting more than 5 million pageviews per month, then well… uh, you win.

Check it out: Linky.

¹ Getting something you made hearted from a hawt Singaporean web designer / blogger is not a bad thing

² Unfortunately, Google has stopped accepting new web site registrations for the time being, since it’s proving to be a little too popular and is bogging down their servers. I can’t even imagine what kind of load it would take to bog down a Google server.

The web application I wanted to build: I have two roommates, and we needed a way to keep track of expenses in the apartment (such as rent, cable, utilities, misc bills). So I used this opportunity to build just that. The requirements are pretty simple: keep track of total expenses, keep track of who paid what, and keep track of who owes how much.

All in all, it took me probably about 5 to 6 hours to implement something basic that met my requirements. Mind you, this is starting from scratch. I didn’t know anything about Ruby on Rails before this (other than the fact that it existed), so I think that is pretty good. If I were to do it again, it would probably take half as long or maybe even a third. And if I were to do this straight up in PHP, which I am very familiar with, it would probably still take me about the same amount of time. The real time saver with Ruby on Rails is that it does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, which leaves you time to think about more important things like workflows and business logics.

Some things I like:

• Easy to get something up and running fast. The expenses tracking table literally took me 10 minutes to create.
• Intuitive. I was able to guess my way around for about 85% of the time, I didn’t need to look things up very often…
• … which lead to a few wow, that is cool moments
• Produces clean code. Unlike almost every other web application I’ve seen, which is usually some sort of ugly mishmash of PHP, HTML, and SQL
• Refreshing to work with. Not having to worry about CRUD database operations is really nice. This is a real time saver.

Some things I don’t like:

• Speed. It takes a while to load, tho this could be because of a configuration problem on my host (Dreamhost).
• Documentation is a bit lacking. The online video tutorials helped a lot, but I spent a lot of time chasing my tail over one or two seemingly minor issues. Stuff like, “how do I sum the total payments for a roommate?”, which is slightly more complex logic
• DNS issues with the database. This really isn’t a problem with Ruby on Rails. I put this down because I almost went nuts trying to figure out I couldn’t connect to the database.
• Doing tech support for my other WordPress plugins. Ugh, why can’t I just write perfect code?
• Not much else…

As you can probably see, I can’t really find anything bad about Ruby on Rails after working with it for a day or so. It really is a great web development framework to work with. Give it a try. There is a great online video tutorial which demonstrates how to create a basic publishing system in just 15 minutes.

So now that I have some idea of how to use Ruby on Rails, all I have to do is find some Web 2.0 business plan, combine that with AJAX, web services APIs, and maybe some tagging, and I’m good to go

PS: Wholly Yours by David Crowder is awesome.

And in other news, I’m getting lots of great feedback on my latest WordPress plugin. Nifty! For reasons not entirely clear to me, some even think I’m a genius. Now if only girls¹ would think of me like that… but maybe instead of “genius”, how about “suave”.

¹cute, female, single

So over the course of the next few hours, I sat down and wrote a plugin for WordPress to do just that. Here’s my second ever WordPress plugin, the Flickr Post Bar plugin. Just like Flock’s Flickr Top Bar, this plugin displays a scrollable and searchable row of photos to your WordPress edit screen. Unlike Flock, which just allows you to retrieve photos by username, this plugin allows you to search for photos either by username or tag, or any combination of both. Once you have found a photo you want to use, just click on it, and the proper HTML snippet will appear in your post. Now with Flock, you can drag and drop photos into your post, but since WordPress doesn’t have a wysiwyg editor installed by default, I didn’t spend the time to make that happen. And also drag-and-drop actions seems like a lotta JavaScript kung-fu I don’t really want to think about, especially if it’s not for work.

Click for a screen shot:

If you are a WordPress user, check it out and let me know what you think! >

Uhm, what is a “social browsing experience”? It’s hard to say exactly, and sounds more like a buzzword a marketing department would come up with… but one of it’s core features is that it will integrate your blog, photos, bookmarks, and whatever other online identities you have directly into the browser itself, giving you easy one-click access to your data. So for example, if you give Flock your Blogger username and password, you could drag a picture or snippet of text from the web page you’re currently viewing and drop it into a “blog it” toolbar and have it automatically appear as a post on your blog. So that’s kinda cool. This easy access in turns allows you to share your ideas more easily, thereby creating a social browsing experience. That’s the idea anyways. Here’s a quote that might be helpful:

Flock’s browser is built specifically for a new, emerging generation of Web users, one that isn’t satisfied passively browsing media online. Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online – BusinessWeek

I’ve used it for a couple days, and while it certainly is a very nice web browser (it’s based on Firefox), I’m kind of on the fence with Flock. Sure it lets you post entries to your blog without too much work, but the thing is, I can already post to my blog without too much more work. It’d probably save me a whole 30 seconds per post (the time it takes for me to navigate to my blog’s admin screen), but the main drawback for me is that I can’t edit the HTML source directly. I certainly appreciate the efforts and motivations behind it, but I don’t know if it is the New And Improved Web Browser they’re making it out to be.

I’m also not sure how there can be an entire company behind a web browser that’s given away for free. To me, it almost feels like the hype surrounding Flock is something more akin to the hype from the DotCom Boom in the 1990s. Lots of great and innovative ideas, but no real business plan to keep it sustainable. Maybe that’s being a little harsh, but I don’t think by much. Or perhaps their business plan is acquisition, which seems to be back in fashion these days (Flickr, Upcoming, Weblogs, MySpace, Latest-Google-Purchase, etc).

In anycase, go download Flock for yourself (especially if you have a blog), and give it a whirl or two. You might even like it. More opinions on Flock from around the blogosphere.

PS: You’re reading post #100! I would like to take this opportunity to thank the 5 people that actually read this site: my mom, my dad, me, my boss, and the random surfer from Asia who was actually looking for noodle recipes¹. Thanks for believing in me and for hitting the “Reload” button to keep the web stats numbers up.

¹ I made this up.

The source code and more info is here: Flickr DHTML Badge

Unlike work we do for clients, we have a little more flexibility with what we can do with our site… since well, it’s our site. So we can experiment a bit more with the amout of flair we use, and try out some things we wouldn’t ordinarily try with our client web sites. Here are some of the really neat stuff we did, in no particular order:

• Ohhh-ahh nice fonts for all headers. We use a very specific font for our headers, instead of some generic web font like Arial or Verdana, and we do it without actually creating any images.
• Neat-o team introduction page. This is a DHTML widget I put together, which makes use of some custom Javascript functions and routines I wrote. Also degrades quite nicely for older browsers.
• Squeaky clean XHTML compliant code (well, for the most part).
• And a bunch of other hidden behind the scenes tricks…

I’m pretty proud of this site, as is everybody else that worked on the site, since it really showcases the quality of work that we are capable of. Explore the site, and learn more about the mission of my company. If you know of a church or ministry that needs an awesome web site, have their people talk to our people and we’ll get something setup

SilasPartners.com

Alright, so basically there’s going to be a new “.mobi” domain specifically tailored for mobile devices like phones or PDAs. These new domains are not any different from “.com”, “.net”, or “.org”…. which is fine. The basic premise behind the .mobi domain is so that mobile devices like phones or PDAs have a ‘special section’ of the Internet designed exclusively for their use. Which seems ok at first glance, but upon closer inspection, the reasoning behind .mobi doesn’t make sense.

First of all, in terms of actual usability, typing “mobi” with a phone keypad is at least 9 key presses. So a domain like “ringtones.mobi” is going to require at least 30 key presses on a standard phone keypad. If the idea is for people to easily get to websites specially tailored for phones (and PDAs), then it should at least be somewhat easy to enter the domain name. A better domain which I’ve seen someone suggest is something like “.pad”. It is 3 times easier to use, since “.pad” is only 3 key presses on a phone. However, this issue could probably be mitigated with some sort of predictive text entry system.

Regardless of the usability issues brought up with the .mobi domain, phones and PDAs in general are reaching a point where they’re becoming mini-computers of sorts in terms of capabilities and functionality. As the feature set (especially screen resolution) increases for phones and PDAs, the need for special ‘lite-version’ of web sites are going to become increasingly rare. Think of it like the recent jump from dial-up connections to fast DSL / cable connections. It doesn’t really make sense to create “highspeed” web sites specifically tailored for high speed internet connections. Practically everyone’s already got a high speed internet these days, so creating two versions of a website is a waste of time and effort. .mobi might’ve been useful 3 or 4 years ago when bandwidth and screen resolution were bigger issues for portable devices, but now… not so much.

Third reason. People are already confused if it a website is supposed to be “dot net”, “dot com”, or “dot whatever”… adding another domain to the mix is only going to make this confusion worse. I find myself increasingly just typing the name of the website I want to goto into Google first, since typing in a domain name that I’m not really sure of could very well easily lead me to some random web site.

And finally, all this talk about the need for a new .mobi domain is really moot, since the need for web sites specifically tailored for phones and PDAs can already solved with existing technologies, like style sheets.

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