By Matt Brotherson on July 31, 2007
As I sit here wondering why on earth the glamazons would embarrass themselves on national tv via the show America’s Got Talent, I reflect on all of the stats packages available to us bloggers and site admins. The cat’s gravy is obviously Google Analytics. Great coverage and slick UI. Awstats is what I run since I host all of these sites off a server at my house — gives more detail than you could imagine.
Reinvigorate presents another look at stats with slick graphs and ajax based UI. Enter wordpress.com! Since I’ve switched from b2evolution to wordpress, I’ve used my wordpress API key to utilize Akismet. Now the crew offers a stats collection for all blogs registered under my API key. Andy Skelton released a plugin that logs all hits appropriately.
I guess you can never have TOO many stats apps, unless the javascript they load adds to your user’s page load times.
Posted in site | Tagged blog, statistics, wordpress
By Matt Brotherson on July 31, 2007
This is a repost of Sugavan’s witty reflection on airplane travel.
I travel frequently and I come across all kinds of people. Here I will try to classify them and give you tips and tricks on how to make your flight an enjoyable one (From worst to best)
- The over-sized wind blower: Yep, you can consider yourself unlucky if you get stuck with one of these. When they aren’t farting they are snoring, breathing heavily or sweating.
Tip: None really
- The talkative granny: Ahhh, sit on your seat, watch all the passengers walk in, see this stunning blonde who looks at you smiles at you. You pray that she sits next to you. She walks right past you goes and sits with this dork in the seat behind you, and walking right behind her is a 80 yr old granny who comes and sits right next to you. 3 hours of ‘How are you sonny’, ‘How old are you?’, ‘My…my I reached puberty before you were born’
Tip: When you see one of these just put on your ipod and dont ever remove them off your ears. There are cases when she will tap your hand and still want to talk to you. Well just pretend to fall asleep. If all else fails just endure it through the rest of the flight.
- The religious/ business guy: They usually will begin talking to you with a smile and are confident and go ‘Hi my name is Tom, your cologne smells great by the way’. And after a few lines of talk they get right into the middle of the talk whether it be the lord that is here to save us, or the great opportunity that I should not miss.
Tip: I’ve tried everything believe me…nothing works, just ask to be re-seated 
- The sleeper: Not as annoying when they are awake, these guys spread their legs out far wide so that it touches your leg and they fall side to side and keep hitting your shoulders only to reload and fire again.
Tip: Get to the seat first and relax your leg out first, that way the person will keep his legs within his seat. The arm rest is crucial, take it and you win! 
Posted in announcements | Tagged airplanes, annoyances, road warrior, travel
By Matt Brotherson on July 31, 2007
I’ve updated wp-weather to support PHP4 as the debate on wp-hackers email list indicates that PHP4 support will not be dropped any time soon. Credits to Ingo Schramm for the porting of SimpXml to php4.
Posted in announcements | Tagged plugin, wordpress, wp-weather
By Matt Brotherson on June 12, 2007
Reinvigorate released a real time stats monitoring application dubbed Snoop. The program receives feed from your account to let you know what activity is occurring on your website. They’ve set up several javascript variables to allow for certain event triggering as well. Since my sites aren’t exactly high traffic sites, I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not for this tool. I think it is still a cool concept.
Posted in site | Tagged blog, reinvigorate, statistics, wordpress
By Matt Brotherson on April 26, 2007
An interesting new player comes to the open source world – Adobe Flex. Flex seems to be a powerful choice for building the new buzzword Rich Internet Applications. I’m still unsold on having an entire application be one giant flash movie but time will tell. It does have some powerful capabilities especially in the enterprise dashboard realm. MicroStrategy has released some new flex based functionality to allow developers to build dashboards on top of normal business intelligence reports served by MicroStrategy’s BI platform. I think Flex is a good fit in this arena as it is able to aggregate many reports into a sleek and sexy dashboard. Yet, I’m still struggling to see where this technology will make its place in the traditional web application environment. It is very good for displaying data to a user and providing drill down and aggregation, but I can’t see it replacing the standard forms based approach to transactional based web systems.
A nice article is here at Ryan Stewart’s Universal Desktop.
Hat tip to Nick for sending me the article.
Posted in asides | Tagged adobe, Flex, open source, software