Tasty…

A recent Tweet from Dave Briggs questioning if people prefer online to offline tools got me thinking that there is one aspect of social neworking / online tools that I haven’t tinkered with yet; social bookmarking. Of the major bookmarking services I’ve decided to try out Delicious.com.

Delicious Social Bookmarking

The signup was fairly quick and prompted me to install a toolbar to IE7. This didn’t take too long and added a few quick links, as well as a bookmarks sidebar which, to all intents and purposes, replaces the existing IE bookmarks toolbar. A feature that I wasn’t expecting but which has impressed me greatly is the fact that Delicious then imports your IE bookmarks. You can then log into your account and set which ones you want to share, manage the tags and remove any redundant ones. A further quick trip to WordPress and, via the RSS feed from my Delicious account, I have added my top 5 bookmarks to the sidebar of this site. Job done in about 20 mins with the most time spent weeding and sorting my imported bookmarks.

Of course the main benefit of this is that I can now bookmark pages of interest wherever I am without fear of losing them because they are on my work machine, or my parents machine. It also removes the need to throw emails all over the place to remind me of these links and, with most sites providing social bookmarking quick links (something I intend to integrate at work in the near future) I don’t even need to worry about installing specialist software to take advantage of this.

The next step for this is to test whether I can now import my bookmarks from another PC without overwriting those that I have just imported. Then I will be testing updating bookmarks using Flock (as part of my Flock testing; again, more on that in a later post).

In a world where we should be encouraged as much as possible to use the now available online tools to share data not only with others but with ourselves, I wonder what the next generation of browsers and desktops will look like. Microsoft are already looking at online, subscription based software delivery in the same vein as Google Docs and Zoho, while the MacBook Air is effectively a terminal machine encouraging the use of online software and data storage.

Cloud computing is a fascinating concept, formerly the stuff of science fiction now turned reality and promotion of cloud like services can only be a good thing…

Testing, testing…

In preparation for a future post, I am testing posting to StudioAB using the Flock browser.

Thank you Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes allows for the creation of user defined feeds

I have been working with Yahoo pipes for around a month and a half now and, in the future, I intend to make an in depth post on just how great it is. Quickly, however, I just wanted to comment on how it has helped me solve somewhat of a conundrum. I’d been, for the last couple of days, trying to figure out how I could feed two sepparate RSS channels into Facebook as notes. I had the RSS from this blog going in, however I had removed Twitter from updating my Facebook status seeing as I had some people following me on it. My next challenge was to then get my Tweets into Facebook as notes.

The answer came in the form of this pipe: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=gIutvNzD3RGf46_1073fcQ. This is really Pipes in its purest form. It takes in X number of RSS feeds, tags them up using the looped string creator (so that the end result shows the source feed clearly), concatenates the feeds and orders them by their published date. This produces one massive feed which can then be redistributed via any number of channels, in this case Facebook.

The only real issue I can see is that there appears to be a delay in a feed updating, as is apparent by the Tweet I made moments after linking the pipe into my Facebook profile which has yet to show up on either the Pipe itself or Facebook.

I you’re interested in Pipes, take a look at the link to see how a basic one is put together. I will be delving into them in more detail soon.

New Google Analytics Features

Google Analytics provides free, rich web stats for organisations

Google have been gradually updating analytics accounts to add some very shiny new features, and our (work) account was finally upgraded over the weekend. Apart from a fresh lick of paint and a slightly smoother interface (noticably quicker loading times, too), there have been some significant additions to the functionality provided.

On logging in, the first obvious change is the profile overview screen. In addition to listing your profiles this also gives quick breakdowns of Visits, Avg Time on Site, Bounce Rate and Goals, which can be displayed by day, week, month or year. There is also a traffic lighted percentace increase / decrease figure so that you can quickly see whether your profile is over or underperforming in comparison to the previous period.

Clicking into a profile, things aren’t so changed as to be scary. The dashboard is still laid out in the same way, displaying the point graph at the top and your custom area below. To the left are the usual options for filtering Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content and Goals.

The three big new features, which I will go into more detail with once I’ve had a chance to play with them, are Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reporting and Visualisation. Scraping the surface these features appear to add significant value to Google Analytics for any organisation and should help me to add a lot of depth to my work Analytics reports going forwards.

If anyone has had a play with these new features yet, please feel free to shout out in the comments. I’m off to have a play with my new toys; the first thing I will be hitting back with should be the Advanced Segmentation. Watch this space!

WAMP server

It’s been a good few years since I have done anything with PHP and, not having my old machine with Apache / MySQL set up any more, I have not had a lot of impetus to revisit this language.

A recent discovery, however, of the WAMP server (http://www.wampserver.com/en/) application has rekindled my desire to play with what was always my favourite programming language. WAMP is an incredibly easy way to set up the Windows / Apache / MySQL / PHP server environment. Just download and run the executable and everything is done for you. It took me about 3 minutes which is far less time than I remember from the manual set up I used to do. WAMP server also provides a nice system tray icon to control all the processes.

I’m sure Linux users will scoff at the simplicity of this process, but for setting up a new server on a windows environment I don’t think it get’s quicker than this.

Off the back of this I’m planning on testing out a few open source CMS solutions that run on the PHP / MySQL framework, so watch this space.