Tag: software

Reinvigorate Snoop

reinvigorateSnoopReinvigorate has released a tool called Snoop that will stream live web stats to your desktop. For those of you who have never heard of Reinvigorate, it’s a website analytics solution similar to Google Analytics. Snoop includes some pre-defined events, such as new visitors and notification of returning visitors. You can also setup custom events. Custom events can be created on any website that supports JavaScript. Snoop is available for Windows and Mac currently, I’m hoping they have plans to build a GTK2 interface for Linux.

Snoop interacts with your Reinvigorate account, displaying current visitors and the pages they’re viewing in real time. It even displays comments if a reader posts a comment. Here’s some features available in Snoop:

Real-time Notification
A dedicated asynchronous (non-polling) connection is maintained with Reinvigorate. You’ll know the instant someone makes a comment on your blog, posts in your forum, purchases an item, gets referred from another site, etc..

Audible Events
Each event triggers a unique sound. If you’re caught up in your work, or in another room, you don’t have to worry about missing events.

Name Tag Integration
Snoop features automatic integration with Name Tags so you’ll know exactly who your visitors are.

I’ve been using Snoop on my Windows desktop at work for the last week or so and absolutely love it. I really wish there was some sort of interface for Linux so I could watch visitors at home. I’m NOT going to install Windows at home just so I can use Snoop, although it is tempting. 🙂

0

OpenDNS Introduces Shortcuts

David Ulevitch, founder and CEO of OpenDNS, sent me an email yesterday letting me know about a new feature from OpenDNS. It’s called Shortcuts and looks really sweet. Shortcuts are very simple, similar to bookmarks in your browser. Here’s how OpenDNS describes shortcuts:

You type something short and easy to remember into your address bar and you leap straight to where you want to go. There’s nothing to install and it works how you want it to, no matter which browser you’re using. Add, remove or change your OpenDNS shortcuts at any time.


Instead of going into any more detail about OpenDNS shortcuts, I’m gonna direct you over to Paul Stamatiou. Paul already has a great post with some screenshots and examples of shortcuts, go check it out.

0

I’ve Been Reinvigorated

Reinvigorate is really nice. It’s a website statistics package, similar to Google Anlaytics and Mint. On the Reinvigorate home page, the service is described as “Measurement, performance, and regression analysis tools for evolving websites and blogs of all sizes”, sweet. Anyway, I signed up for the private beta a long time ago and finally received an invitation a few days ago.

Dougal Campbell has blogged about reinvigorate a couple times, check his posts out for some more background information on Reinvigorate.

Reinvigorated Detailed ActivityReinvigorate gives a really unique view of your website or blog, especially when it comes to tracking individual users. They also have a neat feature called “Name Tags”. Name Tags associate information on your website or blog (names, email addresses, etc) with the session id assigned by Reinvigorate. For example, this lets me track commenters based on the name they use when commenting. If someone comments, the name they used in the comment will show up in Reinvigorate. This makes it easy to see all the pages the commentor visited and how much time they spent on each page. Reinvigorate describes Name Tags as follows:

Name Tags are an easy way to identify exactly who your visitors are.

It works by associating information your site manages (username, e-mail, account ID, etc..) with the session ID Reinvigorate uses to track visitors on your site/blog.

It’s extremely simple to setup, even if your site uses its own proprietary user account system. 1-2 extra lines of code and we take care of the rest.

Reinvigorated - Plugin for WordPressName Tags are extremely simple to make use of if you use WordPress. Reinvigorate has a plugin for WordPress that makes using Name Tags a breeze. The plugin also prevents you from having to manually add the tracking code to your blog. You can turn on Name Tags right from the plugin options page. Just activate the plugin, enter your tracking id, turn Name Tags on or off, and you’re set.

I’m really happy with Reinvigorate after using it for only two days. It’s exciting to know it’s still in beta, so hopefully they’ll continue to add features and more options. One thing I would really like is the ability to select a date range to view data for. Especially for the search terms, I want to see my top search terms over certain periods of time. Same goes for popular pages too.

If you haven’t already, go sign up for the beta. You may have to wait a while for an invitation, but it’s worth the wait. I can’t wait to see what the developers have planned for Reinvigorate in the future.

0

Mint 2.0 Bird Feeder and WordPress

Shaun Inman has released version 2.0 of Mint, my favorite website analytics software. Go over to the Mint website and have a look at what’s new in version 2.0.

If you’re a Mint 1.x user, you’ll have to pay another $19 to make the upgrade to 2.0. I purchased the upgrade for version 2.0 earlier this week and finally got around to actually upgrading earlier today. The $19 is well worth the upgrade, Mint 2.0 brings many nice new features, like the Bird Feeder pepper for example:

Your RSS and Atom feeds attract all kinds of colorful wildlife, Bird Feeder is a window onto that activity. It highlights subscription trends across multiple Feeds and clicks on individual Seeds. What’s a seed? That’s bird-ese for an article or link within a feed.

Upgrading from Mint 1 was pretty painless, the only thing I’ve had issues with is the Bird Feeder pepper. There seems to be quite a bit of confusion about installing the Bird Feeder pepper. I haven’t really finished installing the Bird Feeder pepper, I don’t want to risk breaking my feeds. I’ve been watching this thread over at the Mint forums for tips. Recently, a forum user linked to a post by Kristin Pishdadi, who has posted a how-to for getting Bird Feeder working with WordPress 2. She spells out step by step what needs to be done to get Bird Feeder working with your WordPress feeds. Looks pretty straight forward, I wonder if it works the same if the WordPress Feedburner plugin is being used. I need to read up some on how exactly that Feedburner plugin works first I guess.

The wp-mint plugin for WordPress should still work fine with Mint 2.0. All the javascript in Mint 2.0 is included in exactly the same fashion it was in Mint 1.x, so that plugin should still work 100%.

So, if you’re having trouble getting the Bird Feeder pepper working with WordPress, go check out Kristin’s post, it’ll probably take care of your problems. It’s a lot more clear about installation than the readme that’s included with the Bird Feeder pepper. The Mint forums are an excellent resource for support issues of all types, check them out if you have problems outside the scope of Kristin’s post.

0

WordPress 2.1 Release Candidate 2

WordPress 2.1 Release Candidate 2 is out, roughly two days after RC1 was released. I’ve been keeping up to date with 2.1 releases since beta 2. You can download 2.1 RC2 here.

The only plugin I’m having trouble with in WordPress 2.1 is the FlickrRSS plugin. Ultimate Tag Warrior also had problems with WordPress 2.1, although I didn’t experience any of them. Ultimate Tag Warrior wasn’t slightly broken, it was trashed, and would delete tags for posts. Here’s what the guys at NeoSmart had to say:

Ultimate Tag Warrior is completely broken with WordPress 2.1 and you can lose all your tags by upgrading to WordPress 2.1. In the more recent SVN revisions of WordPress 2.1, any time a comment is added, deleted, or unapproved, you lose all the tags for that particular post.

Thankfully, Christine, the Ultimate Tag Warrior author, has released a new version of UTW that’s compatible with WordPress 2.1 (I think). I believe the new release implements a fix that was published for the UTW/WP2.1 issue back in December. There still seems to be some speculation over weather or not version 3.1415926 of UTW fixes all the problems with WordPress 2.1. I never had any problems with UTW and WordPress 2.1, even with versions prior to 3.1415926. Sounds like the problem may be somehow related to Akismet from the discussion going on at the UTW forum.

0