Laptops are the worst for this, since there are more vendors turning out more new crap…. For example, my HP Pavailion dv6-1230us; the HDMI port is tempermental, and the sound card fails to run at all in Ubuntu 9.04. I’m currently upgrading to the Beta 9.10 with high hopes, but I’ll be sure to let you know. Another feature this machine happened to have is LightScribe–a feature I just assumed would not be usable. On a whim, I googled “ubuntu lightscribe” and was thrilled to discover a page detailing the 5 easy steps to get it running on Ubuntu. It’s a pretty stripped, simple interface, but hey–it works!

You can find the debs or rpms pretty easily on the lightscribe site if you need them for another distro.

Caught in the balanace of wanting to get something good and wanting to just get something soon, I followed a recommendation on a forum to try out trac. Trac is an open source, “Integrated Project and SCM Management” system. After digging around in a couple of demos, and reading a few reviews, I decided to jump in and give it a shot. The features that sold me: 1)the entire thing functions like a wiki; there is an explict wiki built in, but then all milestones, tickets, and revisions (see next feature) can be written in wiki formatting and accessed via internal wiki links. 2) Subversion and git integration; you can review the timeline, and see change sets or entire source files right in the browser! 3) plug-in extensibility; I immediately added plugins for finer-grained access control, and account management. I also tried out a time estimation plugin, but decided that it has a ways to go before it is truely useful.

A couple months into it, I’d say it’s been well worth while. The interface has been well done, including the ability to pull ticket reports based on which side of the milestone progress bar you click (very cool), and it’s saved us a lot of headaches by concentrating and connecting our internal documentation with our tickets and our source code. A couple of things I would love to see in the future are out-of-the-box ldap support and the ability to nest tickets. I really can’t complain though, given that it beats out a lot of pricey solutions, and it took next to no time to connect our geographically distributed teams up. Quite a few well-known FOSS projects have adopted it, including Piwik, the Wordpress Plugin Directory, and Browsershots (there is a decent list on the trac site).

The article mentions the 80/20 rule of feature use, and that got me to thinking of something I’d seen in the Piwik plug-ins directory: clickheat. I looked it up out of curiosity, and not ten minutes later I had a copy running, logging clicks on my development system. Our system is resource based (having several hundered individually assigned/authorized resources), and each user is presented with a menu tailored to the features that they have access to. That gives us a pretty good edge on keeping things simple, but even so I know that there are well-intentioned features that can get in the way; as such I’m not about to turn down any intelligence available to me.

Clickheat–like it sounds–logs all the clicks on whatever page you add it to, and then does some geometric math to overlay a heat pattern on a copy of the webpage; the result? A graphical representaion of what users are doing on any given page, overlaid on the actual page that clickheat fetches with javascript.

A "thermal" map of clicks overlaid on the page

To be perfectly candid, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to figure out, but it sure wasn’t bad. You have to do a couple of simple things (like setting a site name in the javascript tag before pasting it into your html, and deciding how to group pages for logging) and the documentation leaves much to be desired, but all in all it was worth a few moments that it took to install. It will be great when this tool matures a little and possibly adds a database back-end (right now it’s all file logging), but in the mean time it will still provide interesting use information to help us reduce the effort for our users to find and access what they really want: that golden 20.

If you already understand the value of analytics, then you likely also know that Google is the modus operandi for the majority of webmins: mostly due to the lack of viable alternatives. Now, I’m all about the innovation, convenience, and especially anti-Microsoftism that Google brings to bear. That being said, they have more information about more people….and “Don’t be evil?” Really?

Enter a new option, Piwik. Piwik offers all of the basics (referrers, search engines with keywords, page counts, etc.), but what’s more, it’s all open source MVC. In other words, anything it lacks, you can add. It has an easy modules and hooks design so that your MVC plug-ins can be displayed in the eye-candy, flash-based graphing widgets–it took me all of five minutes to drop in the GeoIP plugin. The API is very clean for dropping calls into other apps as well. Installation couldn’t be easier, requiring only a database user and php5 with the mysql module.

I’m now using Piwik on pretty much all the pages I host and a few others I have a stake in, or as favors for friends, so I know what you’re looking at =). Don’t worry, I’m just using it to improve things.