“jon -

just a quick ‘thank you’ for the code you posted re: parsing csv files.

i have a gi-normous excel csv file with individual records spanning multiple lines because of multi-paragraph ‘notes’
fields in each record.

your solution of counting the fields and then parsing subsequent data based on the number of columns is so common sensical it makes me embarrassed that i didn’t think of it.

thanks again,
bruce.”

Working from that figure, 3.971 years are spent  using the applications per month!

You can read why you should always use a source control system like Trac/Subversion in Ronald Widha’s post.

For a cheap and easy to set up hosted Trac solution, all you need is a DreamHost hosting plan. It is extremely cheap (I have a discount code for you). You also get some other notable benefits including:

•    Virtually unlimited bandwidth
•    Virtually unlimited disk space
•    Links easily to Amazon’s CloudFront content delivery network so you can have your content mirrored at servers all around the world (blog example)
•    Free Google Adsense credit (usually $50)
•    Option to have a virtualised server with root access, with memory configurable to the megabyte instantly, and Railscrapetc
•    97-day refund guarantee
•    One free domain name registration
•    Option to host your email and documents with Gmail and Google Docs for free (this is usually chargeable for businesses)

I’ve hosted my personal sites and projects with DreamHost for years, and found them to be reliable. There have been some downtimes here and there but nothing serious. For the price I pay and the amount of resources I use (I use over 1TB of bandwidth a month) it is a fantastic deal. Ed Eliot agrees. I have also found the support to be very friendly and generally quick, and there is an option to have telephone contact (often unavailable with cheaper web hosts).

I also designed an application using DreamHost’s API and won their competition (prize money $$$ ).

You can get $10 off an already cheap hosting plan using the code JONH10. You’ll also get one free domain name registration. There is a 97-day refund period so you don’t risk anything giving it a go. Click here to sign up.

In summary, the cheapest DreamHost account will give you a one-click Trac and Subversion hosted solution.

And yes, I do get a reward if you sign up

Space from AndyH Software

This software creates a visualisation of your hard drive so you can see how much space files and folders are using. Click on the screenshot to view an example.

For example, you may find that your temporary files are very large and deleting them would free up space. Or perhaps your photo gallery is so large that it is time to archive last year’s photographs to DVDs or an external hard drive.

It works with hard drives, CD/DVD drives, mapped network drives and FTP accounts.

You can try it out in full by downloading it from here. After 30 days you can decide to purchase it. The installation is very minimal and not bloated.

Download for Windows

However, the installation was so simple that I have nothing do add to the installation notes from the official site.

I have been using ClickHeat on my personal site and a few high traffic web sites. It has already proved useful on this personal site, as I noticed people had been clicking the graphical header at the top of the page expecting to be returned to the home page. However I had neglected to set this up, so I quickly made the change. Here is the heatmap that indicated this to me:

Here is a heatmap from a friend’s relatively high traffic social networking web site:

From this heatmap we noticed that most clicks were for opening message threads (as expected), but were surprised by the number of clicks to some of the more obscure options placed at the edges of the web site. As a result, the site is going to be redesigned so that these features are in the main left navigation bar to make the web site easier to use.

The system uses a tiny 6KB JavaScript library, and recording clicks only used a few bytes of bandwidth. The administration web site works quickly and doesn’t seem to be a resource hog at all.

You can download ClickHeat from the official web site here. It requires PHP and the GD graphics library, and is a simple install requiring no database. This UNIX permission calculator may come in handy when setting up directory permissions so ClickHeat can write its log files.

I have noticed a problem with the heatmap being aligned with the web site, and a separate issue with elastic layouts creating problems with heatmap display. There are already bugs raised for these issues on the project homepage, so they should be resolved in time.

Here are some relevant articles:

Tapefailure and RobotReplay alternatives
CrazyEgg and RobotReplay
CrazyEgg — Learn Your Visitors Habits
How Crazyegg improved our website overnight
Crazy Egg Launches Confetti
Crazy egg Review. Find out what people are doing on your website

A popular commercial alternative is CrazyEgg. The articles I have linked to will have much more information on the wealth of extra features that it has.

If you have any success stories from using heatmaps, I’d love to hear from you.

UPDATE: Paul Olyslager has sent me this article which gives a great overview of heatmaps and some of the alternatives to Clickheat.

ClickHeat heatmap screenshot

I previously tried a few different free trials of commercial heatmap systems. I dismissed a few as unreliable, and many were more than adequate. However, I’d like to have an open source project on my side like ClickHeat, as I could use the results as I wish rather than be tied down to a commercial supplier’s system. Also, ClickHeat will be free to use, although there will be time costs involved in implementing and maintaining it.

Heatmaps are a useful tool in user interface design and testing. While watching users use your web site or application in real life and real-time is ideal, heatmapping is automated and results from thousands of users can be analysed. Combined with metrics such as goal tracking with web analytics tracking such as Google Adsense, heatmaps allow you to compare different versions of a user interface and find the best to deploy.

I’ll update my weblog when I have some results from ClickHeat, and I also intend to write a brief guide on how to install and implement it.

You can visit the ClickHeat official web site here.

You can subscribe to my weblog using the subscription links near the top of this page.

Update: Further post available here.

I have diverted old URL links including the RSS feeds using Apache’s mod_rewrite.

Here is an example of the code I used, placed in an htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^blog_rss.php$ /articles/feed/ [R=301,L]

This code rewrites any requests to blog_rss.php to /articles/feed so that any requests from the old feed are now redirected with a HTTP 301 response header to the new feed. The ‘L’ indicates that this is the last change the RewriteRule should make, effectively ignoring any rules that may come after this.

RFC2616 from W3 specifies HTTP 301 as ‘Moved Permanently.’ Using this code should help search engines like Google, Ask and Yahoo to update their indexes. I’ve done my part by following the published standards.

WordPress also links nicely to Microsoft Word 2007, so I can take advantage of its grammar and spelling checkers, and the useful feature of holding down Alt and clicking on a word to access research tools such as dictionaries and a thesaurus. Skatter Tech’s article describes how to connect Word 2007’s Blog feature to WordPress.

I’d like to see Wordpress supporting SQLite, but it looks like this isn’t on the cards for some time.

With the burden of making my own blogging software removed, I intend to be posting more interesting articles in the future. I hope to be posting on more varied subjects than just web technology. If there is anything you’d like to hear about, please leave a comment. You’ll also get a funny avatar monster made for you if you comment

I used PHP, CURL, SQLite, AJAX and Google Maps.

If you are a Dreamhost customer, you can use the Dreamhost Real-Time Hit World Map here.

Screenshot:

If you are a Dreamhost customer, you can use the Dreamhost Real-Time Hit World Map here.

After using both for the past few months, I have found that the DynDNS Spring Server is much easier to get started with initially, but Amazon’s EC2 is much more flexible.

Pingdom response times for Amazon EC2 server

Pingdom response times for DynDNS Spring Server

I switched from using the Panosaurus panoramaic tripod head to a Nodal Ninja 3, and am having good results. I’m sure the Panosaurus is perfectly adequate, but I couldn’t for the life of me assemble it!

Some technologies that I have been experimenting with recently include Amazon Cloud Services, including the Cloudfront, S3 storage, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. I have also made use of the Amazon Mechanical Turk, and have plenty of ideas for how it could be used. The Mechanical Turk allows you to request tasks to be done by a huge human workforce of around 100,000. As an example, you could ask for 1000 voicemails to be transcribed, the workforce would transcribe them, and the result could be returned. All these services that Amazon offer are opening up many horizons.

One such horizon that perhaps shouldn’t be opened, is the fact that with just a credit card, a nefarious programmer could spawn hundreds or thousands of high-powered virtual servers, and launch Internet attacks, break encryptions etc. I hope Amazon have a strategy in place for such events so they can be avoided. Such an attack could be on something like the weakness found in MD5 SSL certificates which may be exploited using a large amount of computing power.

Some of the benefits of this new version include the auto-resizing of Adobe Flex (so much easier and reliable than using Stage handlers in Flash), and some AJAX enhancements. Enjoy!

Some of the features aren’t 100%… if you find any problems, please contact me.