Author Archives: Ron Bieber

WordPress Statistics Plugin – BAStats

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I’ve been looking for quite a while to find a good statistics package that could give me an idea of what is going on on the site over and above the default Analog stats that my web provider provides.

Tonight I came across the beta version of BAStats, by Owen Winkler. The package is a WordPress plugin and as such was installed and functional in minutes.

I’ll have to figure out whether it winds up being useful, but the amount of data it collects for the amount of effort I had to put into installing it is definitely worth it. Currently, through my administration panel I can report on the following metrics:

  • Top Page Hits
  • Top Hosts
  • Top Referring Pages
  • Top Operating Systems
  • Top User Agents
  • Top Search Phrases
  • Recent Page Hits
  • Recent Hosts
  • Recent Referring Pages
  • Recent Operating Systems
  • Recent User Agents
  • Recent Search Phrases
  • Graph Top 5 Page Hits – Segmented
  • Graph Top Page Hits

I don’t have enough data to see what the last two items do, but it looks like I now have quite a bit of information at my fingertips. I’m hoping this stuff is more intelligible than trying to sift through the analog stats. Time will tell. Right now all I see is crawlers.

Update

I was receiving some errors in the control panel and a data type error on the main page. To remove these messages, I did the following:

In the file BAStats_options.php, change the function check_option to look like the following:

function check_option($opt)
{
$settings = get_settings('bas_options');
if (!$settings) { $settings = array(); }
if(in_array($opt, $settings)) echo ' checked="checked"';
}

At line 115 , change the following code

if(in_array('log_spam', $options) && in_array('referer_spam', $settings))
{

to the following:

if(!is_array($options))$options = array();
if(!is_array($settings))$settings = array();
if(in_array('log_spam', $options) && in_array('referer_spam', $settings))
{

These changes should fix the errors you are receiving.

The Final 72 Hours of Blastwave?

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I hit on a message on the Subversion mailing list that there were Solaris packages for the latest version of Subversion on a site called Blastwave. This is a site I had never heard of and thought it was pretty cool that the latest version of the Subversion distribution was available so quickly on a site.

I had this message bookmarked in my mail to go back to later. As I hit the site this morning I found a message on the title page about the possible closing of the site due to lack of funding. Apparently, the operators have been trying to get corporate funding for this service for a while to no avail.

I would think this would be something Sun would want to contribute to given their recent opening of the Solaris Operating System to garner support. Apparently it is already a well established community dedicated to more than just the version of Solaris just opened, but supports packages for earlier versions of Solaris as well.

This is pretty sad. For the longest time I had frequented sunfreeware.org until performance made it more cost effective for me to build the software on my own. If blastwave has decent performance and gets the most recent packages for a given software suite built as quickly as they did for Subversion 1.2.3, it would be in the Solaris communities best interest to support it.

This is the biggest problem I think we have right now. While the internet is a commons that anyone can contribute to, it is very difficult to fund efforts like this that provide a community service without a revenue model behind it.

The Gillmor Gang – Another Example of High Value Podcasting

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Over the last week or so I’ve started listening to a podcast called the Gillmor Gang over on ITConversations. I’m getting a ton of value out of it and figured I would make a quick mention of it here.

The two episodes I’ve listened to so far are the January 21 episode, in which the Gang talks about RSS and blogging, and the February 4, 2005 episode on which Dan Bricklin is the guest and the gang talks about innovation.

Both podcasts were quite interesting and explain 4-5 very different views on the technology discussed. The really nice part about this podcast compared to other tech podcasts is the fact that each of the participants are long time members of the technical landscape, including Steve Gillmor, contributing editor at ZDNet, Doc Searls, senior editor at Linux Journal, Jon Udell, lead analyst, InfoWorld Test Center, and Dana Gardner, senior analyst at the Yankee Group.

The podcast format is these four guys (and one guest) on the phone just talking about the trends they see upcoming in the industry as related to the show topic.

This show is just one of many that I am finding valuable. I am more and more amazed with the concept of podcasting in general with each new show I find. Over the years, I have been extremely current on some technology while, since I work for a large corporation, I have not quite had the time to keep up on many of the trends going on. Mostly I rely on my people to give me a heads up to something (and to communicate it in such a way that I think it is important enough to spend time on). Consequently, there have been a lot of things I haven’t been able to keep up on in the last couple of years.

The quality of podcasts from an information standpoint that I have come across are outstanding. The time shifted nature of the medium allows me to listen to the content when I have time, during an hour+ commute to work. If a show is longer than my commute — no problem. I turn off the iPod and when I get back in the car and plug it in, its right where I left off in the show. If something is referred to in a previous episode — no problem. They are all available for me to go back and download. This is an area in which mass media radio just doesn’t give me the same value.

There are quite a few podcasts that I have been turned on to over the past few months that have given me much needed perspective shifts. One of them is the Gillmor Gang. For overviews of things going on in the news, I like GeekNewsCentral. For software development related information, I’m really enjoying the DrunkAndRetired podcast.

Each one of these I have had referred to me by someone in the blogosphere, by people I don’t even know. What a great world we live in nowadays!

When I first received this little white box for fathers day in June, my mind raced with the possibilities of not having a bazillion Cd’s in my car. I had no idea how much a little device could open up the world to information on my terms – when I had the time to listen. As it stands right now, I rarely listen to the music I spent a whole weekend ripping off of my CD collection.