One year ago ( or even more ) I found which was called MongoDB. This database  concept is designed around “NoSQL”. The first time I saw it i thought: Uh, why the hell should I use it? And even the syntax it is used to get access to the stored data locked weird to me. You access your data like an array ( In general ). And I thought: It must be slow, if you compare MySQL, for example, against MongoDB. The idea was, as every language when you remove int, string and so on, the engine must first find out, which type of data is stored. But after reading a few benchmarks and tutorials about it. I can´t admit, that this database “type”. Is pretty powerful, easy to use and amazingly fast.

But you might still think: Why should I use, learn or even keep an eye on it?

Well, most users forgot, or at least: don’t want to know what happened to the MySQL developers. ( They were bought by SUN/ Oracle ) They promised to keep MySQL alive as it is. And want to keep it opensource. But we all know that this is just a promise… The EU still keep an on SUN/ Orcale and MySQL. Cause they fear the same thing as many users fear. I dont think they could “close” MySQL now or later. But they could do other things. Reduce resources, introduce buggy versions. Stopping to work with the community and much more.

But now I don´t fear the death of MySQL, MongoDB is getting better and better. And if MySQL lose users, MongoDB will get more users

Link: http://www.mongodb.org/

The tutorial/ blog, which opened my eyes: PHP-Classes-MongoDB

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I tried some freeware Video editing software tools. I wanted to edit some videos I made ( One gaming video for example ).

And one of those programs contained this adware “tool”. ( For example changeing Default search site )

I tried two tools to remove it one was: XdelBox

URL: http://www.xdelbox.com/

But it is in Beta and doesn’t worked for me… But maybe time will change it, when it is out of Beta

Then I found Malwarebytes antimalware ( Which also free ). And this little tool worked for me.
After a system scan it found MANY entries of this virus/ Adware and deleted them. You just need
to restart your PC because, zwunzi is in use and it must be delted after a restart.
A new scan showed nothing and the task manager is now freed up from Zwunzi.exe

URL: http://www.malwarebytes.org/

Good luck

BTW: If anyone know a free video editing tool, which allows me to “crop” parts of a video, and export them as a new Video. Please let me know.
I want to cut out a specific part of a video for example only the character/ hero.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Here I want to write about some common mistakes in web-development. Those things aren´t programming related. More “good” practice things.

If someone make the wesite design. And someone else have to code the “html/css” you should:

Name the elements by site/page and position

For example, if you designed a news background header. Which is seen when a news is shown, you should call it: news_show_header_background.jpg
Or another example, some things need/ have a border. On top, left, right and bottom. For listing news.
you could call it: news_list_border_top.jpg

If you have to show a table. You should determine if the data is scanned vertical or horizontal. Or even both.

Here is an example

As you see, the vertical line are thicker as the horizontal lines. Which make it easier for the eyes to read the vertical data. The numbers are right aligned. Which makes it easier to compare them. You could even alter the colors, of each row. But use only “slight” different colors. So just a little bit brighter/ darker.

You have to remove both lines, if Data should be read vertical AND horizontal. But try to avoid things like this. Better make two tables.
Well the last case should be easy to know. Make horizontal lines thicker and the vertical lines thiner.

Try to do queries at the end of script ( or other external things like soap/ xml ) So the user see something when it may”stop”

This is  more “ui” related, try to build with as less points as possible. And everything reachable with two clicks

The points thing. An example:

Bad:

[table]
[tr]
[td]THING ONE[/td]
[td]THING TWO[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]THING THREE[/td]
[td]EMPTY FIELD ( NOT SEEN)[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

Better like this:
[table]
[tr]
[td]FIELD ONE[/td]
[td]FIELD TWO[/td]
[td]FIELD THREE[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

So the eyes have to move “less”

• The so called F navigation system is the most excepted “site style”
  Top navigation, left sub navigation, and in the middle the content.
• Use everywhere the same header and bottom design. So the user knows where  the content starts and ends.
• The most start position for a mouse on a website is top left.
• The eyes move from: Dark to bright, from big objects to small objects.

movement binds the user to look at. so try to create movements which “aid” the eyes. Simplest example are arrow. AND stop the movement after 2 secs or less. ( OR if there is no way to stop it, or it must move) add a stop button or make it “slow”.

So don´t use big “rectangles” where you just place “eye candy”

Some people know how colors “create” reactions on people. But most of them don´t know that different countries, have different color “feelings”. It is no problem if you write in German for example, or in Chinese language. Those sites are “targeted”. But if you write in English, people could come from everywhere. If you don´t want to “annoy” Chinese people ( Just an example ) Try to use very bright or dark colors. Or avoid colors at all . Cause very bright colors, or dark colors don´t “trigger” the color emotions. If you take a look at mc donalds, amazon or ebay. They use bright colors. And have much “white” background.

With this way, they don´t create emotions, which they don´t want to create.

Another thing is: Try to avoid faces. Or forms which could look like a face ( If you write in English ). Faces create different emotions, from different persons. The only exceptions are womens. ( Sorry, but sex sells ) Or if you are a model agency, or sell clothes. Or it is your “personal” blog. Faces make things like this more “personal”. Or a small firm.

I hope, I could help some people with this, if you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

If you get a error message like this one:

The installed version of PHP GD does not support image rotations. It was probably compiled using the official GD libraries from http://www.libgd.org instead of the GD library bundled with PHP. You should recompile PHP –with-gd using the bundled GD library. See: http://www.php.net/manual/en/image.setup.php. An implementation of imagerotate in PHP will used in the interim.

And you run a debian Linux server and you have access to it. And you don´t want to recompile (it) . Here is the solution for it:

You could use the dotdeb repository. It has everything you need. Just set this sources:

deb http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all
deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all

In your:  /etc/apt/sources.list file

Run apt-get or aptitude, and your done

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Well, tried hard to get the fine module to work. But I cant… Problems I run into:

After adding a node returned to wrong domain ( main domain ) fixed by ucommenting out the $base_url variable
in settings.php

Content not shown on right site ( all sites ), every time all “pages” are shown on all sites.
Or they where only shown on one site, even when all sites are selected.
This could be fixed by using “views”. But this would mean much work.
Cause you have to create MANY views…

well, I will use the normal, multi site setup of Drupal

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I searched for something which could replace piwik. Cause it is not stable ( OsDate crashed with it )
I searched around and found on a blog a comment about open web analytics. A long time ago,
I saw this php website analytics tool. But I was not interested in something like this. And forogt about
this one.

Then I “re-found” it, and tested it. And I must say: Iam impressed. This tool works nearly out of the box.
You just have to make changes in the config file, related to your web-address and database settings. Add your site
Add your tracking code ( A javascript “similar” to google analytics ). And you are done, nice!

And the api looks much more “thought-out” than the one from piwik.

Here are the features from there website:

Invocation

• PHP API – invoke OWA from within your PHP application. This allows for an easy way to build web analytics right into your application logic.
• Javascript Tag – invoke OWA from Javascript. This allows for remote logging and integration with non PHP based applications .
• WordPress v2.x plugin – full featured WordPress plugin seemlessly integrates OWA with the WordPress publishing platform and administration interface
• MediaWiki plugin – provides tracking of MediaWiki articles and special pages.

Tracking/Reporting

• Track Page views, visits, and unique visitors over time
• Track unique, new, repeat visitors over time
• Multiple Web Site Support – track any number of web sites and view statistics in aggregate or by site
• Click-streams – view the actual click-stream of each visitor
• Click Tracking – Track where exactly on a web page users are clicking and view clicks by browser type
• Click Heat Maps – view a heat map of where users are clicking on your web pages
• Google Maps – map your visitors on Google Maps
• Google Earth (KML) – view your visitors in Google Earth via a KML file export
• RSS/ATOM subscription tracking – track unique feed readers, reader types, and feed requests
• Visitor Aging – understand the age of your repeat visitors.
• Canned and Custom Time Periods – generate reports using pre-defined reporting periods or custom date ranges
• Refering Page Analysis – View the title, anchor text, and surrounding text of inbound links from refering web pages
• View visits by user agent
• Track entry and exit pages
• Track pages by custom page types

Development

• Full MVC based framework
• Module framework allows developers to extend OWA’s entitiies, events, reports, and graphs without modifying the base components.
• Plugin framework for authentication, database access objects, data validation, and geo-location
• Object Relational Mapping layer
• Lite templating layer
• Event handlers

Deployment

• Events can be writen to the database asynchronously.
• OWA to can run on multiple front end web servers and write to a remote database.
• Event Logging and admin/reporting user interface can run on the same or seperate servers

WordPress Specific Features

• Track visitors by WordPress user name or e-mail address they use in comments.
• Track all Wordpress Page Types (Posts, Pages, Authors, Archives, Categories, etc.)
• Track the number of comments made by visit
• Reporting accessable via Admin Dashboard
• Track subscribers to RSS/Atom feeds

MediaWiki Specific Features

• Track article , catageory and special pages.
• Track all visitors by user name and email address.

Quite impressive, eh?

now I run crawltrack for, uhm, well crawler things. And OWA for website statistics.

The only problem so far is the “click-map/ heat map” It shows the click points. But not the website.
I hope they will fix this “small” issue

I dont know, why this both programs are not more popular? Together,
they create a VERY strong team!

LINKS:
http://www.crawltrack.net/

http://www.openwebanalytics.com/

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

As far as I know. Nearly all engines and there “page ranking” depends on backlinks, and internal links

In the “early” days of the internet. The search engines just counted the backlinks. And generated a “ranking” with it.
“Big” sites were treaded different as “small” sites. And when we “the normal” user talked about something in a forum.
We created a link and “push” the site ranking. And let other users know about this site.

Today with all different ways how links are created:

Nofollow tag
Only viewable after registration
Short URL services
and so on….

And many other ways to “prevent” search engines reading links. We forgot the “normal user”
which are the basic of every internet site, there value and there way of getting new user.

Today, it is not enough that people speak/ write about websites. All they write is “not” counted.
We prevent search engines to show us links, which are “new”. For example. I searched something
about debian and how to setup proftpd. I decided to use this search string:
debian how to setup proftd lenny. All I got was no sense. Unusable stuff.
Without the string: lenny you get “old” things. Which could be wrong, or misleading.

In my opinion, we have to rethink “how” links are treated, and published. Or we end there, where we are now:
Sites are on the top, which spread viruses, trojans and more. This is what happens, when we “lock out” the normal
users….

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Just found out: OsDate dosnt like piwik. If you add the piwik javasript. OsDate stops working. Maybe I will look into it. Or I will use crawltrack. Looks very promising.  Cause it dosnt output any javascript or anything else. The script is only executed at server side. But it limits the information you could gather. For example no “click heat map”… But it should work with nearly every software you could think of. Without the javascript problems The another interesting thing is that  crawltrack tries to protect your site against hackers and intrusions. But I dont know how far they are with this protection and how good it is….

Bookmark It

Hide Sites