Geekinator.com

If you’re like me, you usually go to work, sit on your butt for at least 8 hours, staring at a computer screen all day. Then, you come home and sit on your butt and watch tv ’til you pass out. I used to convince myself that this was normal for a programmer, because what else can I do besides stare at a computer screen all day (by the way, even though I use two flat panel LCD monitors, I still get exhausted staring at them all day), but then I tried something different.

Now, I still stare at my monitors for 8 hours a day, but I recently tried taking a 30 minute walk before I go to work in the morning. WOW, now I know this may have been obvious to those who exercise on a regular basis, but my life has completely changed in the course of a couple of days. I’m now suddenly able to think clearly, I don’t get as tired, and I’m able to be a lot more productive at work and in my life!

Before all of this, I was the poster child for lazy programmers and I thought I was going nowhere. I realized that 10 years ago, when I first started programming, I could knock projects out really quickly and with no problem. Over the last few years, I noticed that I wasn’t the programmer I was in the past, and I thought my mind had stopped working in that area of my brain! I was completely frustrated and ready to give up on programming, but I used to really love it so I knew something was wrong.

I’ve always known that no exercise and a poor diet only leads to problems, both physically and emotionally, but of course I was always too stubborn to do anything about it, until now that is. I’ve only been walking for a couple of days, but I can already see the results…yeah, I am in that bad of shape. It’s pretty pathetic, but I know I’m not alone.

Let me give you an example of just how much simple exercise helped me at work:

I have been working on a project for about a year and still have not really gotten anywhere with it, and I’ve been extremely frustrated with the fact that it’s not a huge project but I couldn’t get my head around it (On a side note, my dad and I own our own company, which is why I still have a job…mainly because of other streams of income produced by my earlier programming projects.). Anyway, over the past few weeks, I have been trying to figure out a way around a problem and it seemed no matter what I tried, I always failed. Sometimes, I would get lucky and something would work, but for the most part, I simply haven’t been able to think like a programmer consistently, for a very long time.

My parents have been on my case for the longest time about how I need to exercise (and start eating the right foods too, but I’ll conquer one problem at a time) at least a little each day. I have tried walking in the past but really didn’t pay attention I guess, or didn’t want to change for some reason, because I always fell off the wagon. So, I decided to try walking in the morning again, and this time I am definitely going to stick with it. I noticed a complete change, the very first day I did it! I have been trying to figure out a solution to a programming problem for several weeks and it was driving me up the wall! The very first day I walked, I came in to work with a clear mind and a lot more oxygen than usual, and voila…out the code came! I couldn’t believe it, my mind started working FOR me instead of against me!

I was still tired when I got home from work, but I knew it was because I had actually used my head instead of beating it against a wall. I can’t say this enough, but if you’re in the same position I was, you NEED to try exercising just a little bit each day…it WILL change your life, I promise! You don’t need to overdo it, in fact overdoing it is probably a bad idea because you’ll want to quit really fast….I’ve been there too.

For now, I’m sticking with my 30 minute walk each morning, come rain or shine. I hope that my solution will become your solution, or even part of the solution. My dad always says “There’s only one way to eat an elephant….One bite at a time!”. So, even if a little exercise is only part of your solution, your life will be that much better…trust me!

My company owns a lot of domain names, and we have created various sites to host on those domains over the years. The one problem we’ve always had was trying to figure out the best web stats software to use on all of these sites. I’ve tried Google Analytics, which is ok but very limiting in my opinion, as far as being able to back them up, search, etc. I’ve also tried awstats and webalizer, but found them really technical. Yes, I said “technical”…even the geekinator gets confused with technology sometimes : ). I thought I had hit the motherload when I found Piwik Stats, which is a free Open Source web analytics script. It has some really great features, and is really simple to use, but unfortunately for me, it doesn’t seem to work that great when you’re trying to track a ton of websites on a single server. The processing script takes hours and hours to process the traffic on all my sites, and was kind of glitchy when dealing with that amount of data. I would get strange, random, results. I’m sure Piwik is a great solution for someone who only needs to track up to a few sites, but that wasn’t me. I decided I really just needed a service that hosted the tracking software, and used their server for processing the data.

I had almost given up and just put Google Analytics on each site, so at least I have something tracking visitors….something’s always better than nothing. Then, one day, I started to get frustrated with having to create a ton of accounts, under a single google login, in order: to track the hundreds of domains that I own. I though to myself “There has to be a better way, without me having to create my own script. I really don’t want to reinvent the wheel if I absolutely don’t have to”. A few hours of searching, finally brought Clicky Stats to my attention!

Clicky Stats is available at http://getclicky.com, and is HANDS DOWN the absolute best web site visitor tracking service/script I have ever had the pleasure of using! You may be asking yourself, “Well, ok, what does Clicky do?”. My response to you would be, What doesn’t Clicky do?!? This software is amazing, and lets you have control of your stats, instead of leaving you wondering how you’ll be able to use the stats.

First off, the creator of Clicky Stats, wrote a really simple and powerful API to allow anyone to access their stats in any format they want. Yes, there are other web stats packages out there that offer an API as well, and that’s all fine and dandy, except I’ve never used one that’s so easy to use. Second, Clicky gives you every piece of data under the sun about the user. Lets run down the feature list, if I may (Get ready for this…it’s a huge list : ) ):

• Customizable dashboard that displays data about the current day
• List of visitors for the requested date period
• How many actions each user took while on your site (i.e. how many links they clicked/pages they viewed)
• How long each visitor spent on the site
• The referring site/search engine, plus any search query they typed in to find your site
• Each visitor’s IP address, Hostname, ISP, Language, Location, Operating System, Web Browser, Screen Resolution, and whether or not they have Javascript enabled in their browser.
• Action log of each individual visitor, which tells you in order which pages they visited on your site
• List of the most active visitors on your site, along with their IP and how many visits they have had in a given date period
• Traffic sources, broken up by searches, direct/bookmark, links, email, and social media
• Web browsers used, broken up by browser version
• Operating Systems used, broken up by operating system version
• Mobile devices used, broken up by device version (i.e. iPhone, iPod touch, Blackberry, etc)
• Screen Resolutions used
• List of visitors’ Country
• List of visitors’ Region (i.e. State or Province)
• List of visitors’ City
• List of visitors’ Language
• List of visitors’ Hostname and Organization (i.e. their ISP)
• Global map of all the visitors for a given date period
• Global map of recent visitors
• List of all the pages visited, along with a hit count (I’d like to see a unique visitor count per page, but I can’t have it all I guess : ) )
• List of all entrance pages, along with hit count
• List of all exit pages, along with hit count
• List of all downloaded files, along with hit count
• List of all clicks (not sure exactly what this does)
• List of incoming links (links that people clicked to bring them to your site. i.e. a link in forum post for instance. This has the exact url of the page the link was on)
• List of domains that brought visitors to your site
• List of outgoing links (external links that may exist on your site)
• List of links that recently brought visitors to your site
• Unique List of links that recently brought visitors to your site
• List of short urls (i.e. clicky has a short url service, called clicky.me, which allows you to create a short link, that redirects to your page that has a long url. Tinyurl.com does this as well)
• List of searches (through search engines) that brought visitors to your site, along with a visitor count
• List of keywords typed in during those searches (basically, it splits the search phrase into individual words, and then gives you a visitor count per word)
• List of search engines, along with their subdomains, that brought visitors to your site, including a visitor count from each domain.
• List of recent searches that brought visitors to your site
• Unique list of recent searches that brought visitors to your site
• You can create goals for marketing that you can then track, to see if the marketing is working or not.
• You can track advertisement campaigns as well. I’m not quite sure how you do that, since I’ve never played with that feature.
• You can track traffic through your Twitter feed, if you like. Again, I’m not quite sure how that works, because I haven’t played with it.
• My absolute favorite feature of Clicky, is the real time Spy feature. This thing is so cool…what it does, is show you an ajaxified (I’m guessing) map of real time traffic on your site! It shows a pin where the visitor is in the world, and what they’re searching for to find your site, along with what page they’re currently on or have been on. You can literally spend hours watching people mess around on your site…it’s really cool.
• Another really useful feature, is the ability to setup scheduled email reports, that send you requested data from your stats, by day, week, or month.
• You can also output selected data in CSV or XML format, which is really handy.
• You can also track your feedburner account, if you have one.
• Another feature that I really like is the ability to block your own IP address, so it doesn’t count your personal visits.
• Last, but not least, are the widgets. There are multiple widgets that allow you to display certain traffic data on your site, if you would like to do so.

There you have it…whewwww, that was a lot of typing! Anyway, I hope you get my point. Clicky is the most useful tracking software I have ever found. If you know of something better or similar, please let me know.

I have to say, the pricing is fantastic as well. I won’t say what my monthly fee is, but I can tell you it’s way more than fair. Here’s a link to their standard pricing page. I was given a custom price, because I have a lot more domains than they show on the price page.

If you’d like to check out Clicky, and signup for an account, click here. You can even try it out with a FREE account, which limits the features and amount of data, etc, but you can get a great idea of what Clicky has to offer your site.

Have you ever uncontrollably smiled ear to ear? That’s exactly what I did when I saw Zombieland in theaters, and I have to say, the Blu-Ray has the same effect…hmmm, must be the same movie.

From the beginning to the end, Zombieland is a funny and adventurous trip that doesn’t take itself seriously, which is why it’s so great. If you’re looking for another scary zombie horror movie, this movie is definitely not for you, because it’s freakin’ hilarious! No scary bits in it at all, which is what I was expecting from the trailer anyway.

The Blu-Ray is packed with extra features, including Deleted Scenes, Commentary (with Woody Harrelson & Jesse Eisenburg, First Time Director Ruben Fleischer, Writers Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick), Behind the scenes featurette “In Search of Zombieland”, another featurette “Zombieland is Your Land”, Visual Effects Progression Scenes, and Theatrical Promo Trailers. I’m sure those features are also on the DVD version, but because the Blu-Ray is special, it also has “Byond the Graveyard” Behind-the-Scenes Picture-in-Picture track, and something that I’m sure is totally awesome (but I haven’t experienced yet, because my current Blu-Ray player doesn’t have BD-Live connectivity), is movieIQ, which is a BD-Live feature that connects you to access real-time information on the cast, music, trivia, and more while watching the movie!

I’m going to say that this movie tops my 2009 best list, simply because it’s so fun to watch. Yes, it’s completely ridiculous, but that’s what I love about it. I sat down expecting to like this film, but came out absolutely loving it. Definitely worth the money, and I had to own the Blu-Ray as soon as it came out.

Well, the Zombieland Blu-Ray (and DVD) is now out in stores, and I suggest you at least rent it if you haven’t seen it yet, or want to laugh some more if you’ve seen it already.

My dad and I have been thinking about creating some informational videos for the visitors to some of our websites, for quite some time. What neither of us had was experience, knowledge, or the equipment to make a good video.

So, I did a little research online, asked some friends, and tried to figure out what we were going to do. I realize that our industry, RVs, isn’t the most popular online (meaning I’m not expecting to get millions of views for a RV financing information video) but we get quite a bit of traffic, so decided to give it a try.

I personally own an Aiptek A-HD+ 1080p Pocket Camcorder already, so I tried filming some segments with it. The problem I had was, even in a “quiet” small room with the computers off, I was getting tons of static noise in the video. I realized that I needed a camcorder with an external mic jack that worked well.

I didn’t want to spend a fortune, since I have know idea how to produce a video, so this would be a trial run. So, after a couple of hours searching various forums and shops online, I found that most people preferred the Kodak Zi8 1080p Pocket Camcorder, because it produces excellent quality 1080p video (h.264 with a mov wrapper) AND has a built in external mic jack. The mic jack is only mono, but for the videos we’re planning, that’s fine. What’s even better is it’s under $200 (at least when I bought it, it was)…great! Oh…there’s even an HDMI jack on the camera, AND an HDMI cable is included in the box!

I ordered one from Amazon, and was able to find a remote (yes, it even supports a wireless remote control!) on the Kodak site (sort of weird that was the ONLY place I could buy one online…at least that I could find), and an Audio-Technica ATR-35S Lavalier Mic on Amazon.

I played with the camcorder after charging it for a couple of hours and I have to say, the video looks incredible on our Sony Bravia 46″ LCD HDTV. I shot at all the resolutions (1080p 30fps, 720p 60fps, 720 30fps, and WVGA 848×480 30fps) and I think I like the 1080p quality the best.

The only downside to shooting in HD, I think, is my computer isn’t quite powerful enough to preview the playback at full speed while editing. Good thing is, I can still listen to the audio in real time, so cuts aren’t that hard to make. I have decided, after posting several HD videos on YouTube, to post dvd quality (720×480 or so) videos to youtube, because they load much faster than HD.

Last weekend, I started to notice that Madden 10 on Xbox 360 would freeze at random on the loading screen, following a game in NFL Superstar mode. I looked all over the net to see if there was a fix for this problem, and it turns out that I’m not the only one having this issue. Not only is this happening in the Xbox 360 version of the game, but also in the Playstation 3 version.

I was able to find a single post, after a few hours of searching, that mentioned a way to at least prevent the freezing from occuring. Only problem is, you have to do it after every game you play. It’s a little annoying that EA hasn’t had this problem patched yet, but this is better than nothing.

All you have to do to prevent the freeze, is after every game you play, save your superstar, then exit career mode. Then, if you want to play another game, resume your career. It’s worked for me every time and it really doesn’t take that long to do.

I’m not sure, but this problem might also occur in Franchise mode or other modes in the game. If so, try saving your game, exiting the mode, and then load your save, after each game.

I can’t believe I haven’t learned about this little trick until recently, but I’m sure glad I learned it. A lot of you may already know this, but there’s a simple little tag you can add to the top of your PHP pages that will speed up the transfer of your site significantly, and on the fly. Don’t ask me how it works exactly, but I can tell you that it uses gzip compression (from what I have read) to automatically compress the output of your pages before it’s sent to the visitors’ browser.

All you have to do is add the following line to the top of any php page you want to compress: ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”)

For example, if your page looks like this:

<?php

echo “This is my page”;

?>

Your finished, compressed, file would look like:

<?php

ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”)

echo “This is my page”;

?>

I also read somewhere (and if I can find the post again, I’ll update this post to give that person credit), that you should add an if statement around that line to make sure the visitor’s browser supports gzip. I’m not sure if it’s absolutely necessary these days, but I added it just to be safe. So, the line I add to my files is:

if(!ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”)){ ob_start(); }

Now, I’m not an expert at compression or anything, but it works and that’s good enough for me until I find out there’s some sort of problem with doing it that way. By the way, you can test your page to see if the gzip is actually working or not by going to http://www.whatsmyip.org/http_compression/. Another thing I should mention is your server has to have the zlib php library installed and active. You can read more about that at http://php.net/manual/en/book.zlib.php

On most of my large files, I was able to compress the output by as much as 90% in some cases. The larger your output is, the higher compression you’ll achieve. I’m not sure if this is the “correct” way of adding the compression to wordpress, but all I did was add the line to the header.php file in my template. I tested the site and it’s gzipped!

Of course, there’s also the added bonus (more likely the reason you’d want to do this for a really large site) of saving on your bandwidth usage. For really large sites, the cost of bandwith can be pretty large, but I think I like the idea of it speeding up the site for my visitors even more than the bandwith savings.

I hope that helped everyone as much as it helped me. Thanks to the guys over at WhatsMyIp.org for the information.

EDIT: I didn’t know this until a few days after posting the php code, but you can also gzip an entire site  using .htaccess (at least the html output of the site anyway). All you have to do is add these 2 lines to your .htaccess file:

php_value output_buffering On
php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler

I’ve always subscribed to the “don’t reinvent the wheel” theory in everything I do, especially when trying to develop software. However, sometimes the wheel turns out to be a little lopsided.

Over the past few years, I’ve used a couple of different classified ad systems to run my fairly successful RV Classified Ads website, that my dad and I own, called www.RVClearingHouse.com. The first system I used was custom built and we paid $5,000 for it in 2000 and it worked really well. Well, long story short, we had a problem with the company that built the software and they turned off the site.

I then built my own system with PHP and MySQL, before I really knew what I was doing. It was simple and worked OK, but still wasn’t scalable. My company owns and operates over 2,300 small websites, so by the time I needed some new software to run my classified site, I figured I should just buy a turnkey system instead of taking the time to write my own. I did a little research and found that most people recommended the GeoClassifieds system, and I bought the $100 version first to try it out, but decided it was too limited and upgraded to the $700 version on a gamble. 3 years later, I’ve had nothing but problems with it and am now taking the time to develop my own, that will hopefully work much better than my first attempt.

I’ll admit that I’m pretty lazy when it comes to programming, so I looked at some various frameworks and decided that cakePHP worked the best for me. Now, some of you out there may agree or disagree with me, and that’s perfectly fine, but for me cake seems to do the job. I figure I have a couple more months of fine tuning my code before I migrate my existing ads (roughly 9,000) into my new system.

When I started brainstorming, I decided it would be a good idea to be able to add any custom field that I wanted to, based on a category. For instance, if I wanted an Items for Sale category and a For Trade category, the for sale category would need a price field, whereas the trade category would most likely not. I’m not sure if the method I chose to go about setting up custom fields in the database was the “correct” way to accomplish it, but it seems to work fine. Until I come up with a reason why it’s a horrible way, then I’ll stick with it.

Anyway, that’s about it for my first post. It doesn’t give you much useful information I guess, but at least you can get a sense of what another wannabe programmer is up to in the world. I’ll be back with more amazing adventures of The Geekinator!