One Stats Plugin to Rule them All!

I’m testing a new plugin for Wordpress that keeps track of visitors to your website.

Firestats is still in beta, but it’s looking incredibly attractive already. One simple plugin activation in your WP admin panel, and you’ll start getting in a flood of information about who (and what) is visiting your website.

Unlike most other stats packages available, where Firestats really shines is in its ability to drill down to the information you actually want to see. Its big feature as of the 0.9.x beta release is the ability to filter your stats, eliminating bots that are constantly crawling your website. By eliminating all that extra crap data, you can actually (and easily) see the user data you really care about.

Thus far, I’ve been particularly impressed. Omry, the developer of Firestats, hangs out in the Wordpress IRC channel, and is very responsive to suggestions and bug reports. With his excellent start on this plugin, I’ve been able to easily realize just how few real viewers I have, and just how many bots are out and about crawling around the web on a daily basis.

It’s not the most feature-packed plugin available (yet), but it’s off to a good start. If you’re looking for a new stats plugin, or just want to see what kind of development progress is made, I highly recommend that you check out Firestats and see for yourself just how much of your blog’s traffic isn’t real traffic.

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8-31-2006
Date
5:59 am
Time
288
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242
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My Experience with Ubuntu

I thought I’d take a few minutes to toss Ubuntu on my old desktop tonight, since I was presently Linux-less at home (minus the PowerBook, but OS X doesn’t really count).

Well, here’s a timeline of my experience:

[6:00pm] Install Ubuntu.
[6:30pm] Fully update Ubuntu.
[8:00pm] Realize that you can’t do shit with Ubuntu on an AMD64 and format the drive to put 2003 server back on it.

That about sums it up. I mean, jesus, I couldn’t even get through step one so that I could use it as an actual useful desktop machine.

Some progress Linux has made… Just make sure you’re an Intel fanboy…

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6-23-2006
Date
4:02 pm
Time
140
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106
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Lots of Cool News Today

It’s interesting how I can go forever and not really find anything I’d consider exciting or really interesting in the news. Then there are those rare days like today, when it seems that I can’t flip through an unread feed without finding something else that’s of incredible interest.

Some of these items are from a few days ago, but I lumped them in with today’s post for one huge news-filled batch of goodness…

First we have Automatically generate .htaccess files. As with Jordan from DownloadSquad, I often have troulbe remembering the syntax of an .htaccess file, and using all those weird regex(-ish) commands just makes my head spin. For anyone developing for the web, this handy little tool has got to be a goldmine.

I’ve been a long time Symantec user (and McAfee hater) when it comes to antivirus products. Still, I’ve often wondered why people pick one product over another (particularly when it comes to enterprise solutions that are centrally managed). Also from Jordan over at DownloadSquad is a tip towards a CNet roundup of six major players in the consumer antivirus market: AVG, Computer Associates eTrust, F-Secure, Kapersky, McAfee, and Trend Micro. Oddly absent is anything from Symantec, but it’s a good read none-the-less.

Now generally if I don’t recognize one of the thousands of processes running on a Windows PC I sit down at, I’ll just Google the name and see what comes up. With search spam on the rise lately, finding a relevent result seems to be more and more difficult (particularly with so many ‘clean your PC’ products clouding results, promising to remove a variety of filenames). In steps yet another pick from Jordan @ DS – the exeLibrary. It’s a very quick, very clean site that indexes almost every executable file you can think of. Not a frequent hitter, but definitely worth keeping a link in your digital toolbox. I know one’s going in mine.

Everyone’s probably heard of Photobucket, ImageShack, and any number of the hundred and one knock-off services. Not everyone, however, has probably heard of AllYouCanUpload – a new service from, surprisingly, CNet. While I’m shocked that CNet of all people would be the ones to offer a new free, unlimited, upload-as-you-need service, Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch thinks it’s a great move into a somewhat already crowded space. Because the blogosphere works in circles, we also can’t miss yet another Jordan special from DownloadSquad covering the matter.

My absolute favorite piece in today’s news was, you guessed it, from Jordan. His tip on snagging EasyEclipse to make the installation process for one of the most advanced and cool code editors I’ve ever seen is sure to save me a ton of time. It’s also pretty damn cool that they’ve got packages for Windows, Linux and my beloved Mac. Writing PHP can’t get any easier!

While not of use to me, since I’m poor, the TechCrunch lead (and discount code) on a cool little company called Logoworks is pretty interesting. I’ve always wondered why it had to be so difficult to get marketing and design work done (not to mention expensive), and it looks like these guys were thinking the same thing. If you need a logo designed (relatively) cheaply, be sure to check them out.

In a huge string of news from Download Squad, we also learn that Google’s promoting a green lifestyle, Microsoft has finally released OneCare (the product I hated), Google claims they have no plans to release a browser (not surprising, given their stake in Firefox), and FireFox 2.0 alpha 3 is out – complete with its new Google anti-phishing utility. Hey, was there anyone other than Jordan Running alive at Download Squad today? And is it just me, or does that sound like a made up name?

As usual, as soon as I buy a product, they release a new model. Looks like my recent Motorola Razr V3c purchase is no exception, since Engadget Mobile has an intro to the V3m that points out all the cool features it aquires in the latest rev. Hey, who needs an SD card on a regular phone anyway?

To finally wrap things up, we most recently have a story called Yahoo Battles YouTube, But Forgets to Bring Flickr from TechCrunch. Looks like a no-brainer to me that Flickr and the new Yahoo! Video service should have been linked. One of the attractive points of Flickr is its simplicity (which is very un-Yahoo!). I’m not sure how well the video service will fly apart from our long-time pal.

Like I said, a big news day, but now we’re done and I think I’m going to hit the sack for some extra sleep. Have fun reading up on all the news I picked out of today’s noise. With a little luck, I didn’t typo any of those URLs…

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6-1-2006
Date
5:59 pm
Time
140
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807
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A Tale of Vista Beta 2 – Part I

UPDATE: I fixed links and images after re-uploading cropped images to Flickr.

Introduction

Now, to be precise, this is all actually based upon build 5384. The build actually released as the official “Beta 2″ may differ. Still, it calls itself Beta 2, so for arguments sake (as well as brevity), we shall as well.

Installation was painless. Whereas Beta 1 was unable to format partitions, forcing installers to trudge out to the command line with a myserious key combination during the installer, Beta 2 was faced with none of these problems. My existing installation of Windows XP Pro was blown away without any complaining, and merely two clicks of the mouse in the lovely Vista GUI installer. (Speaking of which, am I the only one who found it odd that Windows was the last major OS left with a text-based installer? Apple and Linux have both had them for many years, while XP was installed entirely through a white on blue textual interface.)

Installation was surprisingly speedy. It took about 20 minutes to complete the entire process from format to desktop, which I dare say is better than the average Windows XP install time.

The first thing I noticed when Vista first boots is that my second monitor doesn’t flip on a few seconds later, as I was accustomed. No problem. I probably just need to dive in and click the ‘Expand my desktop onto this monitor’ button in my Display Properties… Unfortunately, that wasn’t it; but more on this later.

Welcome Center

Welcome Center

You’re initially greeted with the Windows Vista “Welcome Center”. Basically this is a lot like the “Manage Your Server” concept in Windows 2000 Server and 2003 Server – a central point of some basic information, letting you branch out into the most common areas you’ll likely want to customize first. Notably present is the option for activating Windows, which I swiftly scoffed at and ignored.

Network Settings

Network Setup

The second thing I noticed was a prompt asking me what network I was connecting to. Vista had detected my network card, DHCP’d an address, and wanted to know with what security settings it should treat this connection – sharing or not.

Next Up…

That’s it for now, folks. Next up we’ll look some more at my driver problems, get some screenshots cleaned up in Photoshop (oh, like you didn’t notice all the white space…), and have a lot more fun with this beta. Stay tuned and if you want to spoil some of your fun, check out my Flickr Photo Set of all the Vista goodness, as it gets uploaded.

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5-25-2006
Date
6:38 pm
Time
92
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423
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A tale of SPAM and Akismet…

While I was off in Boston, someone decided to start SPAMing the crap out of my blog. I returned to about 200 messages waiting for me to clean them up.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of it. Not only did I get to stare blindly at the Wordpress admin panel for about 15 minutes selecting and deleting comments en masse (gee, I wish there were a ‘Mark selected comments as SPAM’ button in the Mass-edit mode), but then they decided to pick it right back up a little later.

About 1,000 SPAM comments later, you started reading this post on a nice clean blog. It was actually pretty amazing to watch Akismet start picking up on the SPAM about half-way through. Comment after comment after comment was making it onto my blog, forcing me to delete it, then all of a sudden, none were… Everything was getting trapped by the Akismet plugin.

Here’s to Automattic… Hope to see more fun stuff in the future, boys!

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5-18-2006
Date
11:59 am
Time
101
Views
162
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