h0bbel.p0ggel.org

With the recent surfacing of Damon Cortesi's Twitter Stats I experienced my first real case of Mac envy. I tried running the Perl script on my Debian box, but that crashed and burned pretty quickly since Twitter Stats actually require some OSX software.

In my rush to download and experiment I seem to have missed the part of the Twitter Stats post that mentions that it only runs on OSX.

So there I was, wanting some pretty stats without being able to generate them. Sure, I probably could have started massaging the script in various ways and try to generate my own rendition of the statistics, but I really didn't want to start doing that pretty late at night. In fact, all I probably had to do was to get the .csv file that Twitter Stats generates imported into Excel 2007 (My Debian box does not run X at all), and generate some spiffy graphics there. After all, thats what I did with my Spam Statistics post a while back.

Not feeling all that Pearl(y), I never do, and not wanting to hack away at this right now, I made a subtle call for help on Twitter itself. That worked, Damon himself surfaced and offered to run it for me. How nice is that? Not only is he stalking tracking people who mention his tool on Twitter, but he actively helps them out if they are unable to run it. That, and the fact that he runs a Gallery 2 installation, has to mean that this guy is really nice.

Anyway, here are my statistics. I'm sure no-one but me are interested in them, but I'll post them anyway.




Oh how pretty and useful. Come to think of it, this is probably the most useful Twitter has ever been to me. I ask for something and someone responds very quickly with a solution.

Disregard that it was related to Twitter, posted on Twitter about something concerning Twitter, thats just coincidental, no?

A couple of days ago, Wired published a story indicating that email spam might be on the decrease.

According to Brad Taylor, software engineer at Google, Gmail is seeing a flattening and perhaps even a declining trend in the amount of incoming spam to their servers.

While this might be true for Gmail, it's definitely not the case in the email domains I administer.

Our anti-spam measures, for three domains, has stopped about 75% of all inbound emails. The statistics above are based on all inbound email so far this year, and it clearly indicates that in our case email spam doesn't seem to be going anywhere but up. In reality, compared to others 75% is pretty low. If you compare it to the general statistics provided by Softscan we are pretty lucky.

The fact still remains that we are seeing over two times as much spam in November compared to January, and I can hardly find a way to call that a flattening or declining.

Perhaps spammers are not targeting Gmail in the same way as before, but that only indicates that Gmail not be the best metric when analyzing spam trends.

I just gave the new Google Reporting Suite Analytics AIR beta a test run, and this is one sweet little AIR application.

I guess the developers explain what it does best;

The Google Analytics Reporting suite is an Adobe AIR application that brings Google Analytics to the desktop. It uses it’s own custom API to interact with Google and nearly implements all features of Analytics. See the feature list for more info.

I gave it a quick test run with my available Google Analytics accounts, and it really does a great job showing of the statistics. The application seems quick and responsive, and I couldn't find any immediate problems with it even given it's current beta status.

Very nice!

!

I'm sure a lot of people want to add the new Google Analytics website tracker to their Gallery 2 installs. It's a pretty straight forward edition to make, but I'll outline it here.

1. Copy /gallery2/themes/matrix/templates/theme.tpl into a new directory under templates/ called local. The new copy should now reside in /gallery2/themes/matrix/templates/local/theme.tpl
This makes Gallery 2 use the copy in templates/local/ instead of the default one in templates/ and doing this ensures that any changes you have made will survive an update (either via a new Gallery 2 release or a cvs update).
2. Find the following:

 {* Include this theme's style sheet *}
 

3. Insert the Google Analytics javascript somewhere between and like this:

{* Include this theme's style sheet *}
 
 
 
 

4. Remember to change the _uacct = "UA-xxxxx-x"; to your actual Analytics tracker ID.
5. Watch Google Analyzer give you statistics nirvana

I've been testing the alpha version of Measure Map for 4 days now. So far it's doing a pretty good job of displaying interesting statistics for this site.

It gives you statistics of number of vistors, how popular your posts are, search queries and the lot. The real strength in Measure Map is the way it presents the data though. Stylish, snappy and generally very well presented. Since this site gets a lot of traffic thats not directly related to my Wordpress install I still need a supliment like Awstats to gather the real amount of traffic I get, but as a quick glance view of how your blog is "performing" it does a pretty darn good job.

Ok, so I'm not quite ready for World Domination just yet afterall. Still Measuremaps way of showing where your traffic is coming from is pretty neat.

Conclusion? It's nice, flashy, fun and all good. I wish there was a way for it to analyze traffic thats not going through the Wordpress Index Page, Posts and Comments though, but since this is an online tool and not a log file analyzer it's very hard for it to do so. I love it as an addition to my Awstats though!

More screenshots are available on flickr