Things have been a little quiet on the blog front lately, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been plenty of work behind the scenes. Just thought I'd fill you in on some things I think are interesting.
More Twitter Integration
I've been working on further integrating the WunderCounter with Twitter. Early, you may recall, I added daily stats summaries via Twitter DM (Direct Message). That got me thinking that the immediacy of Twitter lends itself really well to the Tripwire feature. So, I've just about finished setting this up. I'm tentatively calling it Twitwire. The concept is that you can flag IPs which you are interested in and, on a per-IP basis, you can decide which are important enough that you'd like to get a DM when this IP visits your pages. You could find out within seconds who is visiting your pages without even having logged in to check your stats. I think that's pretty cool and I'm looking forward to unleashing it you in the next few weeks. It just needs a bit more testing and then it will be on its way.
Cleaner Looking Reports
I've been integrating the Bluetrip CSS framework with the login area of the WunderCounter. It will make the reports look cleaner and more consistent. Plus, it's just a really handy tool to have in your toolkit. I recently used it on this calendaring system which I put together for the United Nations Association of the United States It makes it very fast to get started with a clean layout which is (I think) very easy on the eyes.
A Little Bit of jQuery
Any JavaScript work I'm doing now is generally based on jQuery. I was using prototype and script.aculo.us a while ago, but jQuery is my favourite JavaScript tool right now. It makes working with JS pleasant (never thought I'd hear myself say that) and it makes simple tasks easy. There's a huge community behind it and almost more plugins than you could wish for. If you haven't had a chance to look at it, I highly recommend it.
New Hardware
I've got a couple of new dedicated servers almost configured and almost ready to go. I'll get those pulling some weight as soon as I can slot the time, but they're also available to be used right away if any other hardware melts down. It's always nice to have a couple of spares.
Getting to Know GitHub
Over the summer, I've taken on some new open source projects and posted them to GitHub.com along with some other work which I've had online for a while. My public GitHub projects can be found at https://github.com/oalders The new projects are:
WWW::Mechanize::Cached This is a Perl module which caches web lookups. It allows you to make your own bots, site scrapers etc which can cache pages, which dramatically speeds things up when you have to re-run your scraper or when you're testing etc. It's a module which I took over from Andy Lester, who was kind enough to give me access to it after I approached him about cleaning up some of the open bug tickets.
Net::FreshBooks::API This is a Perl module which is really just a layer over the XML interface to the FreshBooks API. It means you can do cool stuff with their API without having to mess around with XML. Increasingly, I'm finding that this is a very good thing. I've never been a huge fan of XML. It's often very clunky and, in many cases, total overkill for basic API functionality, but that's likely a topic for a different post entirely. Edmund von der Burg was kind enough to make me a co-maintainer of this module so that I could add functionality for recurring billing. This is for some client work I've been doing. More on that when the site is officially online.
Off the top of my head, that's the important coding-related stuff. Watch for some of these improvements to come online over the month of September. I've already got plans for some new functionality after that, so hopefully there will be lots going on to keep you interested.
Showing posts with label API. Show all posts
Showing posts with label API. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
API: Geo-location Info Now In Tripwire and Watcher Feeds
The API has now been updated and geo-location info is now available in the feeds. This means that your Watcher and Tripwire feeds will now include City, State/Region and Country information where such information is available. In addition to this, if you examine the XML tags of the RSS feeds, you'll see that longitude and latitude has been added as well. These points don't represent the user's exact location, but they will point you at the correct location for the city (if available).
This kind of information is very handy when coding your own applications to interace with the API. The longitude/latitude info enables you to add pushpins to Google maps without first having to look up and geocode the locations provided in your feed. It opens up a lot of possibilities for working with WunderCounter data and for creating 3rd party applications. Since the RSS feed is made up of valid XML, you can quite easily parse the feed via Perl/PHP/Ruby/Python etc to create some really cool stuff.
If you're a developer and you have some requests for API features and/or documentation, please get in touch with me. I'll try to post some Perl code samples in future, so that you can get some ideas for mashing up your WunderCounter hits with your own web site. If anyone wants to submit some code in other languages, I'd be happy to post it here or point others to your site to get inspiration.
This kind of information is very handy when coding your own applications to interace with the API. The longitude/latitude info enables you to add pushpins to Google maps without first having to look up and geocode the locations provided in your feed. It opens up a lot of possibilities for working with WunderCounter data and for creating 3rd party applications. Since the RSS feed is made up of valid XML, you can quite easily parse the feed via Perl/PHP/Ruby/Python etc to create some really cool stuff.
If you're a developer and you have some requests for API features and/or documentation, please get in touch with me. I'll try to post some Perl code samples in future, so that you can get some ideas for mashing up your WunderCounter hits with your own web site. If anyone wants to submit some code in other languages, I'd be happy to post it here or point others to your site to get inspiration.
Monday, January 26, 2009
API Watcher Feeds: Now With Tagging and Pretty URLs
If you're using the API Watcher RSS feeds, you will have noticed that IP tags were not appearing in your RSS feeds. This has now been corrected. Originally, I thought that I had not done the tagging work for the Watcher feeds. Upon closer inspection it turns out that I had, in fact, done the work, but that my work was just buggy. ;) If you're tagging your IPs, hopefully you'll find these feeds much more useful now.
I've also updated the display of the referring URLs in the Watcher and Tripwire feeds. You'll now see that those ugly, long search engine URLs have been cleaned up, just like they get cleaned up in your daily log files. For example,
www.google.com/search?q=wundercounter&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7SKPB_en
now gets cleaned up like this:
www.google.com/search : wundercounter
The links still go to the same place, but they're now much easier to read.
I hope you are having as much fun with these feeds as I am. Right now the feeds are my favourite thing about the WunderCounter. Let me know what you think of the API. I'm happy to hear all kinds of feedback, positive and negative.
I've also updated the display of the referring URLs in the Watcher and Tripwire feeds. You'll now see that those ugly, long search engine URLs have been cleaned up, just like they get cleaned up in your daily log files. For example,
www.google.com/search?q=wundercounter&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7SKPB_en
now gets cleaned up like this:
www.google.com/search : wundercounter
The links still go to the same place, but they're now much easier to read.
I hope you are having as much fun with these feeds as I am. Right now the feeds are my favourite thing about the WunderCounter. Let me know what you think of the API. I'm happy to hear all kinds of feedback, positive and negative.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
How To: Using the Summary Feed
The new Summary Feed is now live and available via the API. It's still in beta mode, but it's available to Premium accounts as of right now.
What is the Summary Feed?
The Summary Feed is an RSS feed which gives you very basic information about your traffic on any given day. It will tell you the number of hits received so far, number of hits expected and the number of hits per hour. The purpose of this feed is give you a quick overview of how your traffic is progressing on any given day.
It generally looks something like this:
The Summary Feed is essentially the same feed as can now be found under RSS on the Options menu. The RSS section of the Options menu will likely be retired in the near future, so if this is a feed which you are currently using, you're encouraged to move over the API Summary Feed.
If you're unclear about the API or how RSS feeds work, please see the Tripwire How To article.
To find the Summary Feed:
What is the Summary Feed?
The Summary Feed is an RSS feed which gives you very basic information about your traffic on any given day. It will tell you the number of hits received so far, number of hits expected and the number of hits per hour. The purpose of this feed is give you a quick overview of how your traffic is progressing on any given day.
It generally looks something like this:
1970 hits since Midnight CST
2074 projected hits by end of day
86.41 hits/hour
The Summary Feed is essentially the same feed as can now be found under RSS on the Options menu. The RSS section of the Options menu will likely be retired in the near future, so if this is a feed which you are currently using, you're encouraged to move over the API Summary Feed.
If you're unclear about the API or how RSS feeds work, please see the Tripwire How To article.
To find the Summary Feed:
- Choose Options
- Choose API
- Click on the Watcher link
How To: Using the Watcher Feeds
Watcher feeds are now live. Just like Tripwire, these feeds are still in beta mode, but they're available to Premium accounts.
What are Watcher Feeds?
Watcher feeds are a little bit like your daily and page log files, but they're distributed via an RSS feed. If you're not familiar with the WunderCounter API or how RSS feeds work, please have a look at the Tripwire How To. This article will explain all of the basic concepts you'll need to understand.
Watcher feeds are RSS feeds which keep you updated on the last X hits to a particular page (or all of your pages) over the last 24 hours. Currently the last 100 hits are reported. That number may change in future, but that's what we're working with right now. Using this feature you'll get a summary of all traffic to a certain page (or all pages). So, unlike Tripwire, you don't need to tag any IP numbers as all IPs are affected.
Who would find this feature useful?
Because watcher feeds provide a lot of data, they're probably not useful to everyone. For instance, if you have a high traffic site, you may not find all of the RSS items to be particularly useful, because there will be many of them. However, even high traffic site owners may want to monitor activity on certain pages (like pages which have been recently added) or very important pages (like payment pages). Sites with lower traffic may benefit from a watcher feed which reports on all traffic as it will give you immediate feedback as to the type of traffic you're getting on any given day.
So, whether or not you get loads of traffic, I encourage you to play around with this feature and see if it's useful to you.
How do I get started?
Once again, if you're unfamiliar with RSS feeds and how to use them, please read the Tripwire article to get yourself started.
What are Watcher Feeds?
Watcher feeds are a little bit like your daily and page log files, but they're distributed via an RSS feed. If you're not familiar with the WunderCounter API or how RSS feeds work, please have a look at the Tripwire How To. This article will explain all of the basic concepts you'll need to understand.
Watcher feeds are RSS feeds which keep you updated on the last X hits to a particular page (or all of your pages) over the last 24 hours. Currently the last 100 hits are reported. That number may change in future, but that's what we're working with right now. Using this feature you'll get a summary of all traffic to a certain page (or all pages). So, unlike Tripwire, you don't need to tag any IP numbers as all IPs are affected.
Who would find this feature useful?
Because watcher feeds provide a lot of data, they're probably not useful to everyone. For instance, if you have a high traffic site, you may not find all of the RSS items to be particularly useful, because there will be many of them. However, even high traffic site owners may want to monitor activity on certain pages (like pages which have been recently added) or very important pages (like payment pages). Sites with lower traffic may benefit from a watcher feed which reports on all traffic as it will give you immediate feedback as to the type of traffic you're getting on any given day.
So, whether or not you get loads of traffic, I encourage you to play around with this feature and see if it's useful to you.
How do I get started?
- Choose Options
- Choose API
- Click on the "Watcher" link
Once again, if you're unfamiliar with RSS feeds and how to use them, please read the Tripwire article to get yourself started.
How To: Using the Tripwire Feature
The new Tripwire feature is now live. It's still in beta mode, but it's available to all Premium accounts as of right now.
What is Tripwire?
Tripwire is an IP alert system. Basically, you can select IP numbers which you'd like to track more closely and be notified when these IP numbers return to your web site. It's easy to set up and use and it takes your WunderCounter experience to a different level. You can be notified of important happenings without logging in to your account and you can be kept up to date even when you're on the go, if you have access to RSS feeds on your mobile phone.
How do I set it up?
First, you'll need to enable the API for your account. API is just a fancy way of saying that the WunderCounter now has a standard way of communicating with other services (like web sites, software etc). You'll need the API in order to get the Tripwire alerts.
How do I get Tripwire alerts?
First, you need to copy your Tripwire RSS feed URL.
If you're already familiar with RSS and RSS readers, you can skip this section. Just add the URL to your favourite RSS reader and you're ready to go.
If you're unfamiliar with how RSS works, it's still not difficult to set up. For instance, if you're a Mac user (OS 10.5 and higher) and you use the built-in Mail program to read your email:
If you are using Microsoft Outlook, please view this article on How to Add RSS Feeds to Your Outlook.
If neither of these options applies to you, a simple Google search will help you locate some RSS reader clients which you can use -- many of these programs are free to download.
If you have any questions about the WunderCounter API or have any feedback at all, please don't hesitate to let me know.
What is Tripwire?
Tripwire is an IP alert system. Basically, you can select IP numbers which you'd like to track more closely and be notified when these IP numbers return to your web site. It's easy to set up and use and it takes your WunderCounter experience to a different level. You can be notified of important happenings without logging in to your account and you can be kept up to date even when you're on the go, if you have access to RSS feeds on your mobile phone.
How do I set it up?
First, you'll need to enable the API for your account. API is just a fancy way of saying that the WunderCounter now has a standard way of communicating with other services (like web sites, software etc). You'll need the API in order to get the Tripwire alerts.
- Click on the Options menu
- Choose API
- Agree to the terms
- Click on the Options menu
- Choose IP Tagging
- You can enter an IP number here and choose "On" for the Tripwire value
- Or, you can choose an existing IP tag. In this case just click on the Tripwire value (on or off) and use the edit box that comes up to change and submit the value
How do I get Tripwire alerts?
First, you need to copy your Tripwire RSS feed URL.
- Select the Options menu
- Select API
- Select the Tripwire link
- Copy the URL which is displayed on this page
If you're already familiar with RSS and RSS readers, you can skip this section. Just add the URL to your favourite RSS reader and you're ready to go.
If you're unfamiliar with how RSS works, it's still not difficult to set up. For instance, if you're a Mac user (OS 10.5 and higher) and you use the built-in Mail program to read your email:
- Start (or choose) your Mail program
- Select the File menu
- Select Add RSS Feeds
- Copy the Tripwire Feed URL
- Click the add button
If you are using Microsoft Outlook, please view this article on How to Add RSS Feeds to Your Outlook.
If neither of these options applies to you, a simple Google search will help you locate some RSS reader clients which you can use -- many of these programs are free to download.
If you have any questions about the WunderCounter API or have any feedback at all, please don't hesitate to let me know.
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