statzen

Reporting That Makes Sense

October 23, 2007 – 8:39 am
It has been a while since I have posted on the statzen blog. The primary reason is that I have taken a little time for myself. I took a motorcycle trip from Tennessee to Washington, DC and back while camping along the way. It was a great time and now I am back and motivated to continue getting statzen into the hands of people who can benefit from it. Right now I am sitting on a plane and have spent the flight working on a way to provide reporting in where visitors come from. I currently see the "referrer" report as the biggest missing piece in statzen. Granted, I am trying to do much more than provide a typical referrer report. I want a report on where people came from that follows common sense. Who cares about identical URLs? The real question is which ...

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The Alpha Has Begun

October 8, 2007 – 10:15 pm
The statzen alpha test has begun. There are some users in the system and we are trickling more in as we have time and know that the system is stable. The fun has begun!

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Why I Dislike Click Tracking in Feeds

September 28, 2007 – 10:22 am
I have lot's of opinions; some of those come through in my software. With statzen I am likely going to provide some features that I am opposed to while helping to educate my users why they are not something I recommend. Click tracking in feeds is one of those things. What is click tracking? Click tracking is a way to collect information about people who clicked through to your website from a feed. The way click tracking works in a service like statzen is that instead of going directly to your blog from your feed, readers will actually be directed to a specially crafted link on the statzen server and then redirected to your blog. The reader still gets from your feed to your blog with no discernible delay, but I am opposed to this method for several reasons that I will get to in a minute. Not ...

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Getting Ready for Alpha

September 27, 2007 – 12:05 am
Ok, I had hoped to start letting alpha users into the system two weeks ago. That sure didn't happen. I got swamped at work and just couldn't get it out the door. Although, if I am being perfectly honest I should admit that I am struggling with releasing an imperfect product even with the alpha moniker which basically means "this software is still in the sucky stage". The good news is that I seem to be back on track now. I have pushed out a major release of the code and discovered some new bugs that need to be worked out. I am squeezing in a few more pieces of functionality too. Tonight I created the email to alpha users and figured out the process for creating accounts and granting access. All the while we are still working on ways to get this thing ...

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Life Getting in the Way

September 13, 2007 – 9:14 am
I have been somewhat stalled on statzen development for the past 2 weeks. I have a few things I need to do before I start letting some alpha users in, but my life (aka day job) is not cooperating. I have to find a way to free up my time. The good news is that the work I have been able to do has been very productive. Many of the things I have been wanting to implement with URL unification are getting checked off the list. The application is getting more useful, but there are still lots of interface tweaks and additions that I need to add before it will be user-friendly. So many things to implement. So little time. More soon.

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Speeding Things Up

August 29, 2007 – 9:43 am
Last night it became painfully obvious that I had to do something to speed up statzen before I could go much further. After some quick indexes and a little database configuration tuning, some queries went from 5 seconds to milliseconds. This is a huge step towards letting people use the system. You may have noticed it is not just the database that is speeding up. Development has accelerated over the past two weeks as well. This is mostly because I have been getting some very positive feedback from people I have been talking to. I have also been very fortunate to be able to work smart, not hard. I think last night I deleted more lines of code than I wrote, but in doing so I was able to add more functionality to the system. While I have not been making releases public, I have been ...

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Micro Applications

August 27, 2007 – 9:43 pm
A few months ago I developed a proof-of-concept widget for statzen. It showed a list of the items on my blog that received the most attention (via the web and feed readers). While I thought that was neat, I also wanted a tag-cloud based on attention. I replaced the top posts widget with a top tags widget.Tonight I revamped the widget to have both the top tags and the top posts. There is a little micro menu in the widget to switch between the views. I am also planning to add more contextual information to the 'this page' option with the widget. I think it will be neat to share some of the information statzen has about the page that is currently being viewed in the browser.I really like the idea of widgets as micro applications. Too many widgets are billboards ...

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Making it official

August 25, 2007 – 11:38 pm
The time has come to have a dedicated place to share information about statzen. Well, this is it.If you are subscribed to my personal blog you will automatically see the posts from blog.statzen.com in the feed. (Combining feeds into a single feed is one of the many capabilities of statzen).The primary purpose of this blog is to be a place to talk solely about statzen. I plan to post about development progress and new features as well as business announcements, etc.It is not much to look at yet.  I am more worried about starting to get information out.  Branding and a polished look can come later. 

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