Archive for the ‘development’ Category
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 site is sending the most traffic. Some ancillary questions are: Which pages on that site are delivering the most visitors? Are those links recognized by Technorati, IceRocket, Google Blog Search ,etc? Are those referrals from a search engine? If so, what are the most common search terms for that search engine? What about the most common aggregate search terms?
That is a fair amount of ancillary questions. The challenge is to how to keep it simple and useful. The key to simplifying referrals in a way that makes sense is through aggregate reporting. First I need to address polyURLism (www or no www, etc), this way a unique referrer will only appear once. Secondly, providing aggregate information on the domain is the primary information that people need. As long as their is an ability to drill-down, starting with the aggregate provides the most information with the least mental processing required from the user.
This is what I am currently working on. I hope to have this glaring hold in the functionality of statzen into the current users’ hands by the end of the week.
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.
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 following the “release early, release often” mantra. Last night I crossed the 150th revision in subversion and I have deployed at least 30 releases to the server over the past few months. Once I start letting people on the server I will probably limit releases to once a week or so for a while.
If you are itching to be one of the early alpha testers, leave a comment here or shoot me an email. The time is getting near.
Tags: development, performance, prelaunch, statzen
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 advertising a service. While I am surely branding the statzen widget, I am more interested in sharing the functionality. I mean, once people know what this thing can do they will want to use it.If you want to see an example of the statzen widget in action check out the right side of jaxn.org.
Tags: development, prelaunch, statzen, widget