Juri's TechBlog: 07/01/2007

3-column-blog-layout

Some of my blog-readers may have noticed the change in my layout. At the moment I'm just testing it (there are still some design problems...as you may notice), keeping the possibility to revert everything to my old layout - in case :D
The reason for switching to a 3-column-layout is that in this way I can better exploit the space on the webpage. Having two columns where I can display information (on Blogger widgets) makes the page much more "reader-friendly". The more you can pack into one screen-size, the better it is. User's rarely want to scroll down endlessly, and therefore widgets placed further down on the page get less attention. Clearly you don't have to overfill it since then everything becomes messy :) .
When changing the layout I had to edit the XML-source of my blogger page. What is a little awful is Blogger's HTML code editor which is basically just a simple text-area. It would be nice if the Blogger team could implement a better editor which could support syntax-highlighting, code-formatting etc...The best solution till now is to just copy everything to a local editor on the computer, such as GEdit (on Ubuntu) or Notepad++ (on Windows), modifying everything there, and copying everything back online when done.
What is really perfect is Blogger's flexibility from which the GPC (Google Page Creator) team could cut a slice. You can change whatever you want and the graphical layout editor will recognize the changes. In this way you can add new widgets and content to your page without having to touch the HTML code again.
I would like to reference the http://blogger-hacked.blogspot.com/ site, from which I took the idea of a 3-column layout.

Aodhan Cullen is the BusinessWeek Young Entrepreneur of the year

Probably you'll ask yourself now: Who is Aodhan Cullen...should I know him?
Well, the word "StatCounter" will tell you for sure more...and if not...then it's worth to continue to read here. Cullen is actually the founder of StatCounter,

an online service for tracking website-visitors.
A month ago I received a mail from StatCounter (as also all other StatCounter account owners), asking to vote for Cullen, as he had been nominated for BusinessWeek's "Young Entrepreneur Award". It seems as if my vote has helped :) , since today I received the mail that he actually won. And his story is really impressing...When he was only 12 years old, he started his first business and with 16 years he launched the Dublin-based StatCounter. If you want to read more about that...continue here.

I actually started this post, since I'm using StatCounter now for a while and I recognized that I've never written anything about it. So...a little bit of advertising for a service that provides great functionalities and is totally free is never bad.

What is StatCounter?

A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of our code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyse and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time!

Free, Fast, Responsive, Quick loading and Reliable Service. (Why is it free?)
Invisible Tracking - no ads on your website.
Accurate real-time website statistics with detailed visitor tracking and analysis.
Taken from StatCounter website

I'm not going now to describe all of StatCounter's features, but only some which I find most interesting use.

Recent Visitor Map

The "Recent Visitor Map" uses the Google Maps API for displaying the location of the site-visitors and some other details such as Operating System, screen resolution, etc...This is especially nice for taking a quick look to get an overview where your blog-readers or website visitors are located on the world. Below there is a snapshot of the Map of this blog here (seems as if some Google employee has taken a look at my blog ;) ):

Recent Visitor Activity

The "Recent Visitor Activity" area is nothing else than the list-view of the "Recent Visitor Map" but anyway extremely useful to quickly see the last few entries. Beside the location from which the visitor came, I find the referring URL specially useful...

Blocking cookie

It's unobtrusive...but I personally find it great, if not one of the most beneficial feature: the blocking cookie. As you can see from the picture, on the overview page, where all your project

are listed, there is a link called "Blocking cookie". Clicking on it, you will be redirected to a page, which creates (or destroys an existing) blocking cookie on your computer, having the effect that your own visits to your webpage won't be logged.
This is actually the feature which led me to the decision to use StatCounter instead of Google Analytics. Analytics has very nice features, specially after the last huge update, they have added a lot of nice flash pieces showing very detailed statistics etc...However the problem there is that they allow only to filter out specific host-names or ip-addresses / ip-ranges. But if you're only a normal, little user behind your computer, writing useless posts to your blog and you don't have a static ip-address, but a dynamic one, which is assigned to you automatically by our ISP...then this feature doesn't help much. For a company with their own server with static ip etc...it may be great, however.

Other features
As I said, I just listed my top 3 features, which I use most or find most useful. However there is a bunch of other features, which I just directly list below:

Invisible Counter Option, Configurable Counter, Configurable Summary Stats, Magnify User, Drill Down, Popular Pages, Entry Pages, Exit Pages, Came From, Keyword Analysis, Recent Keyword Activity, Search Engine Wars, Visitor Paths, Visit Length, Returning Visits, Recent Pageload Activity, Recent Visitor Activity, Country/State/City Stats, Recent Visitor Google Map, ISP Stats, Browser Stats, O.S. Stats, Resolution Stats, JavaScript Stats, Email Reports, Multiple Site Management, User Access Management, Public Stats, Blocking Cookie

copied from StatCounter website

Searched a Google Tasklist?? No? Anyway, take a look at this...

I've seen a lot of people in several online groups claiming that Google should implement some kind of tasklist, possibly integrated with Gmail and Google Calendar.
Today, I've had the pleasure to have an invitation for the Google Mashup in my Gmail inbox (I'll soon explain how this relates to the tasklist ;) ). Since at the moment they allow only a limited number of people to sign-up for it, I had to wait now quite a couple of weeks.

Google Mashup Editor is an AJAX development framework and a set of tools that enable developers to quickly and easily create simple web applications and mashups with Google services like Google Maps and Google Base. Google Mashup Editor is a great tool for grabbing information from feeds and letting users see and manipulate it.

Creating applications with Google Mashup Editor is simple and uses technologies you're familiar with. With our declarative XML tags, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, you can build applications in less time and with less work. For advanced developers, Google Mashup Editor allows you to be more expressive by tapping into our JavaScript API.
(from Google Code site)

And now there comes the tasklist into play. Till now I didn't have the time to explore the Mashup Editor in more detail, since I have to work on a project for my thesis, but I've taken a look and some Mashup examples where I also found a nice, very simple tasklist. There are a lot of other examples such as Calendar, Map Wiki, Simple Feed Reader, Tabs, ... to only mention some of them. You see the full source code of all of them which is quite interesting to look at. I actually didn't have time now (as I mentioned previously), but the code looks very concise...for instance the Tasklist code fits into 1 to 2 pages.
As soon as I have time I'll take a deeper look at the Mashup Editor and maybe write some post...
Here are some first screenshots

Me and my girlfriend

That's me and my girlfriend...at least the "Simpsons"-version of us :)
Just go to http://www.simpsonsmovie.com. They have implemented an amazing Flash-website with a lot of special effects where among others you can create your own Simpson Avatar.

Eclipse Europa is out

Eclipse Europa is out!!!

What is Eclipse??
"Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. A large and vibrant ecosystem of major technology vendors, innovative start-ups, universities, research institutions and individuals extend, complement and support the Eclipse platform. New to Eclipse?"

Is it free??
Yes, totally :) .

What is it used for?