David Carrington

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 :)

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.

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.

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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:

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Soon I’ll have my hands on a Nokia N97, but will I switch? Here’s the factors that have influenced me switching handsets in the past:

1. Nokia 5120 – My first handset. It worked. It made calls. It sent texts. It was enough.
2. Nokia 3310 – It was smaller, cooler, played games, and was my first contract phone.
3. HTC BlueAngel (MDA III) – Windows Mobile, music, camera, big colour touch screen, WiFi, bluetooth and infrared. Amazing.
4. HTC Elf (HTC Touch) – While the BlueAngel rocks, it’s a brick. This phone is half the speed but also much smaller. I accepted that compromise but always hated the slowness.
5. HTC Touch Diamond – Still HTC, still Windows Mobile, but this time the screen was beautifully clear, I had 3G, GPS, a reasonable camera, and a much faster processor.
6. HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) – Oh no, another brick! I debated with myself quite heavily about whether this was worth getting. The Android OS finally convinced me I wanted to switch. I’m a huge Google fan so this phone suits me really well.

In all I have 4 Windows Mobile devices. When upgrading between them I thought in terms of a PC: Processor speed, RAM, screen, etc. Sure they’re phones (except one), but they act very much like small PCs. The CPU and RAM were really important. I mention this because my ideal handset right now would be an Android phone that has a faster hardware and more memory. I don’t mind the size but I would prefer a better battery.

Now I’ve won a Nokia N97 and I don’t know how much I’ll like it.

Here’s the theory:

• it’s slower (434 MHz vs 528 MHz)
• it’s got less RAM (128 MB vs 192 MB)
• … but has a completely different OS
• a better camera (5MP carl zeiss lens vs 3MP)
• and a fairly kick-ass battery (1500 mAh compared to 1100 mAh)

The S60 operating system is going to be the deal breaker.