cmurray.org

Reading Matt McAlister’s blog post today about personalized home pages offered by vendors like Google and NetVibes prompts me to throw in my $.02 about Pageflakes. I came across this customizable portal several days ago (I honestly do not remember where) and have been trying to use and to get used to it since. The concept is simple enough: you have a start page that allows you to add and delete components (called flakes) which are essentially services from a variety of vendors and brands. For example, the start page I have created comprises components listing CNN top stories and Technology bites, local weather, Google search interface, To-Do List, and bookmarks and a tag cloud which are fed by my posts in del.icio.us.

This past week I deployed both Google Analytics and FeedBurner on my blog site. FeedBurner, as I knew from implementations at a previous job, can be tricky to set up properly (in particular, the Apache redirects) and also is hard to debug because changes take a while to propogate to their site from your feeds. But once up and running, I can add all sorts of functionality to my feeds, such as pinging different aggregators when new posts are added and even a rotating banner that scrolls through titles of recent posts to be used as a signature in emails. FeedBurner also gives me rudimentary stats on subscribers to my feed.

But far more interesting is Google Analytics. While I’m using this only out of curiousity and not for anything like marketing, site conversion goals, or ad campaigns, I have been very surprised to see the amount of traffic I’m getting as well as from where that traffic is coming. Granted, a large portion of visits are from search bots, I’m also getting genuine vistors from all over the globe. I can see where they are coming from, whether they are new or returning visitors, what pages they are viewing, as well as lots of other interesting little factoids (all gathered using first-party cookies and Javacript code). It’s also amazing to me that this is free.

Here is a sampling of the kind of data I’m seeing for my site using a date rang of 9/1/2006 to 9/13/2006:

I’ve had several things on my professional to-do list for a while, among them a thorough review and more in-depth understanding of CSS, XML/XSLT (including RSS formatting and the iTunes standards), and some hands-on experience implementing some Google APIs. It’s easy to forget this stuff if you’re not using it regularly.

Here are a few good links to tutorials for CSS and XML:

Introduction to CSS (from Web Design From Scratch)

The CSS Tutorial

What Is XSLT

XSLT Tutorial (from www.w3schools.com)

And here is a Google API for simple search and dynamic content display that can be included on your site (this is live on my site and took about three minutes to implement):

This certainly is a nifty little gadget, but I won’t be adding it to my site because of the noise and disruption to my content. The localization is customizable by both the owner of the site and by a site visitor. It is only one of many APIs Google and others are making available as open-source web services. This gadget comprises all of about 30 lines of code and is very simple to implement (although cutting and pasting the code ruins line breaks–thus commenting-out many lines of code–so some hand tweaking is required).

Two New Tools That CIOs Want

While I have written recently about VMWare from an implementation perspective, this is an interesting article from one of this summer’s McKinsey Quarterly newsletters that nicely sums up why CIOs are looking to server virtualization and software services in particular to get more bang for their ever-decreasing bucks.

Top Ubuntu Apps and Tweaks

While Ubuntu ships with nearly everything you would ever require for your server or desktop, this is another list from LifeHacker that provides lots of great tips for making the environment even better.

Top WordPress Plugins

This is an excellent list for anyone running WordPress as their blogging platform (I found this link on LifeHacker). They do, of course, require admin rights to add and configure. The list comprises many plugins that I use on my own site (Akismet, flickrRSS, FeedBurner Replacement) along with lots of other interestings tweaks. Down within the comments section are more reader-generated recommendations.

Recents events appear to signify that air travellers hoping to carry laptops onto airplanes are soon out of luck. While this indeed is a hardship and inconvenience, it does open the door for exploring alternative means for storing and retreiving data and documents. Business commuters already rely on thumb drives and increasingly can take advantage of such web-based tools as Foldera and countless other storage solutions. Indeed, the corporate intranet/extranet also could be used for this purpose. Security obviously is a key component to such tools.

I have a similar but different situation to solve. I work pretty much exclusively on my laptop. All my data and documentation lives here, as well as all my music, video, and photos of family and trips. It is inconventient and time-consuming to copy all these files and directories over to my desktop PC or onto a volume of my Linux host. What I need is a file synchronization method to update changes made to pre-defined directories on the laptop to these other systems. I understand that Microsoft offers Robocopy for this purpose but it appears that this tool is available only with the Windows Server system.

I did some poking around and found a wonderful solution in File SyncForce, a file synchronization and versioning tool from ObjectForce Software. Using this tool, I choose a source directory on my laptop (say D:\music\*.*) and a destination directory on my desktop (again, D:\music\). I can choose either a full copy blast of the directory or set the preferences to update only those directories that have changes or are otherwise different. In addition, I can let the program run in the background and either synchronize real-time changes or set a parameter to synch at specified intervals. I currently am synching to my desktop because I want the files available there but could just as easily set up a Samba server on my Linux host and map that drive for backups as well.

As addendum to this post, I just was made aware of a Microsoft product called SyncToy. It does require the .NET 1.1 Framework be installed on the machine, however, this is a far easier and more useful tool than the one I described above. The interface is simpler and cleaner and also provides options like synchronize, echo, subscribe, combine, all of which allow a variety of directions and methods to move your files. I don’t see the ability to schedule runs, but then again that’s not something I care to do (I imagine there is a way to use the task scheduler in Windows if I so choose to).