Dec/091
Dabr & the three A’s
Google Analytics is one of those great Google products that I’ve used from the start. It provides very useful statistics, graphs and alerts about site usage. I use it for all of my sites and have recently modified Dabr to work with it too – with only a handful of minor obstacles along the way.
First up was the fact that Google Analytics historically never had very good mobile support. Even once that was in place, I had to mess about with Google’s PHP code to add support for Opera Mini’s proxy servers.
Then, once I had the tracking code in place and was starting to get some nice stats – I noticed a piece of text that I should have seen before I started anything:
5M pageview cap per month for non AdWords advertisers.
Whoops – Dabr has a lot more pageviews than that!
AdWords is their service where you pay Google to show adverts that point to your site. Of course I’ve had to sign up to this (at an initial setup cost of £10) and there should begin to be a few Dabr adverts appearing on websites around the web. I’ve even started getting a few clicks.
Google charges me with every click of those adverts, which is a little annoying, so I’ve set up AdSense too.
AdSense is the opposite of AdWords. It’s where I get to add other people’s adverts to my sites and I get a trickle of cash for doing so. Typically I’ve seen clicks earning me about 10p to £1 each, but clicks are fairly rare. I don’t (yet) know enough about CPM and those kind of fancy buzzwords to tell you any real figures. I’m sure I’ll blog something in the new year.
So now I’ve got the three A’s working nicely for Dabr:
- AdWords to bring in potential new users,
- AdSense to bring in a little cash,
- and Analytics to track site usage.
Thanks Google :)
Dec/090
Google Mobile Analytics and Opera Mini
Google Analytics is a popular web statistics site with lots of useful features, I’ve been a big fan since the start. Google recently added a bunch of new features, and an important one out of those for me is mobile web tracking.
Typically, Google’s way of tracking site usage is to ask you to put a small snippet of HTML onto your site which is essentially a javascript call to their servers. Great – except a lot of mobile phones don’t actually support javascript. So the only good solution is to run some code on the server. I don’t know if it’s related to Google’s purchase of AdMob, but they’ve done exactly that and provided server side code in various programming languages (C#, PHP, etc) to achieve this. See ga.php as a real example.
Great, now I’ve got beautiful graphs showing me how people use my site. But what’s that? 25% of my users live in the country (not set)? I’ve not heard of the place! It turns out those users more or less all used one browser: Opera Mini.
Oh Opera Mini, what a strange beast you are. While the Opera browser is a full normal browser, Opera Mini is a service that installs a thin client on your phone and Norwegian proxy servers visit the site for you. Norway? Well that’s a little better than living in (not set).
Luckily, this whole problem is fixed by a teensy change in their server side code. Rather than always fetching the browser’s current IP address, I tweaked Google’s PHP code so that it detects Opera Mini is in use and sends the real user’s IP address. To be honest, I’m a little confused why this isn’t in Google’s code in the first place.
So here it is. A minor fix to Google’s ga.php file (line 162) to improve Opera Mini handling:
Original line: "&utmip=" . getIP($_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]);
and my version: "&utmip=" . getIP((stristr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'opera mini') && array_key_exists('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR', $_SERVER)) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']: $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]);
That’s all. Now I get real country stats :)
Jul/090
Sending to YFrog from Shozu
TwitPic is great, but it goes down occasionally. That’s why I loved hearing that YFrog had been created by the guys and gals at ImageShack to provide a easy, fast, and stable alternative. Without a doubt, they’re my new favourite image host for Twitter-bound images.
I want to upload them to the internet from my phone, and I’ve recently started appreciating Shozu, but I’ve not seen any official support for sending images from YFrog to Shozu from your phone.
Yesterday I dug a bit deeper and found that YFrog allowed e-mails of photos to be sent in. I tried setting that up with Shozu but it didn’t work. My suspicion is that it failed because my YFrog email address changed in the settings screen every time I tried to look at it.
My solution? PixelPipe. I don’t understand the S60 software at all, but they do provide an email upload address like YFrog do and I know that their YFrog upload routine works. All I have to do is point my Shozu account to e-mail my photos to PixelPipe and that service does the rest. Maybe not the most elegant way to upload pictures, but it works.
Jul/091
What phone to carry – N97 or G1?
I’ve owned the T-Mobile G1 for 7 months and the N97 for a two weeks. I’m not at all experienced with the Symbian OS so I’ve been quite critical of the N97. Now I think I’m coming to the conclusion of which one will be my main handset for the next few months.
Jun/098
N97 niggles
I’m from a Windows Mobile and Android background, and I’ve never owned an S60 phone. Now I’ve got one and I’m not (yet?) convinced it’s any better than those.
Here’s a start of things that bug me so far. Please feel free to tweet/comment and set me straight on any of these issues: