Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

  • Woop(ra)! There it is!

    woopra A couple months ago, I stumbled onto this statistic site called Woopra, and signed up to be a Beta tester. I already use things like Google Analytics and SiteMeter, which let me see how much traffic a site gets a day, based on about twelve different interpolations of the metrics.

    Basically, I’ve learned I can tweak my results to make it look like I get a lot of traffic or a little, which serves no purpose. But I can also compare my sites to previous days, which I actually do find helpful. I can learn what days my sites are heavily hit, which days are good days to upgrade code because no one’s there, and so on and so forth. What you have to figure out is why you need stats. Statistics are meaningless for a site like ipstenu.org, because there’s no money to be made here. For jorjafox.net, I find that they help me understand trends and as that site averages about $.75 a day in ads, it’s beneficial.

    Google Analytics and SiteMeter are both ‘yesterday’ code, however. I don’t get to see the current status of my site until the day after. Most of the time that’s okay. If I really am desperate for pageviews and such, I have other tools on my server to figure that out (and Google Adsense can be brute forced into helping). But sometimes you want to watch what people are doing as they’re doing it, in real time.

    Enter Woopra.

    With Woopra, I can sit and watch people ping the heck out of my sites and see what they do as they do it. It’s a little Big Brother, but honestly, if you didn’t know that someone can tell who you are when you visit their website, it’s too late for you. Woopra lets me watch as people from different countries sneak in and out, where they come from and where they go to when they leave. Like I find that the majority of my hits come from the Gallery (200 pageviews an hour, give or take), and most of the referrers are from the main site or the wiki. This is all stuff I knew, but it’s nice to see them in live tracking.

    Do you need this stuff to run a good website? No, not at all. But if you’re starting to move your site from ‘good’ to ‘moneymaking’, then these are things you have to start to study and understand. Like that it’s okay to have an 11% drop in pageviews at noon, because the average at the end of the day will balance out. Or that you get a lot of traffic at 3pm from youtube. All these things help you better understand the Venn diagram that is your website, and the more you know …

    Well there you are, then, aren’t you?

  • Caveman Tech Support Redux

    Many moons ago I mentioned how Caveman Tech Support was no different than the stuff I do. This is still the case. I will now caveman up my recent phone call.

    Grog: This fire help. Me Grog
    Lorto: Me Lorto. Help. Firekit wrong.
    Grog: You receive Firekit 2.0?
    Lorto: Ugh.
    Grog: Box include sticks, stone, flint?
    Lorto: Ugh.
    Grog: No broke sticks, stone flint?
    Lorto: Ugh. All here. All good. Firekit wrong.
    Grog: (sigh) If all there, what wrong?
    Lorto: No spark, no fire, me confused. Not like directions.
    Grog: *sigh* You missing items?
    Lorto: I missing nothing.
    Grog: You sure?
    Lorto: Me sure. No missing.
    Grog: You sure?
    Lorto: Me have one thing missing. Box say ‘include flint’ but Lorto no have flint. This not make Lorto no have fire, ugh?

  • Cross Compatible

    One of the things about the net that I love and hate is the development of freedom of expression. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a socialist at heart, and I love the fact that people can say what they want, how the want, in the USA. Well, mostly. Illegality being what it is.

    But I digress!

    The Browser Wars ended with a weird stalemate, and it wasn’t by choice of the users. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and their modifications of what was and was not okay in the Web (yes, there are guidelines to web design) managed to reward early adopters for things like HTML 2 and XHTML. They, without ever enforcing rules, and without ever making a browser of their own, managed to finagle enough ‘power’ such that website developers wanted to proudly display their compatibility. No longer did we create sites like ‘Best viewed on IE’, but we aimed for these standards, and coerced our websites to look ‘Okay’ on IE and Firefox, Windows XP and Mac OS X.
    IE 7 looks pretty good!
    But unless you have three computers with multiple boot sectors and multiple browser versions, either physically or virtually, how do you know what your site looks like?

    My personal website I know is ‘okay’ on most browsers. It looks perfect, just as I want, on OS X in Safari and Firefox. It looks good on Windows in Firefox. And then there’s IE. I hate it. I hate it. It’s not safe, it ignores the W3C, and it just doesn’t do what I think it should. Browse Happy is a site dedicated to reminding people about the alternatives. Like Firefox, yes, which is my Windows XP browser of choice. But I can’t just ignore IE, even if I hate it. Oh, I ignore IE 6 and older, but 7 and 8 I need to pay attention to. So what do I do?

    I hit up sites like BrowserShots, where they will go and snag a screenshot of what my site looks like in a freakishly vast array of browser/OS combinations. It’s not perfect, sometimes it hits weird errors where things I know look fine suddenly don’t. But if you want a quick shot to see what CSS stupidity certain browsers entertain, well, it’s good and free.

  • IMAP

    When I first got email, it was long before Hotmail was a reality, let alone this concept of unlimited Gmail storage. Email was tightly controlled and maintained, with ‘free’ accounts being unheard of. If you didn’t get an email with your college, you didn’t get email. High School students, like I was in the baby-internet days, didn’t need email. This worked out to a lot of advantages, keeping kids off the nasty places in the ‘net simply by virtue of requiring an email address to log in.

    Initially, we all used PINE for email and logged in via telnet into the server to access everything. ‘finger’ was a useful command, and you knew everything you needed to that way. I liked having all my email in one central location, since you always knew where to go to get it. But there were down-sides to this, of course. If the server was down, you had no way of reading your emails!

    Shortly thereafter we got access to Eudora and POP3 email. Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) let you download your emails to your computer, putting the onus on you for maintaining and deleting your mail. It was deleted from the server once you downloaded it, and it was only on your computer. Initially, I was able to stash everything on a single floppy, or two depending on how I felt about things, and Eudora was just as useful as I wanted it to be.

    For over a decade, I used POP3 and I was happy with it.

    This last year, I’ve been using webmail on my laptop, while leaving my desktop running some lengthy process, and then later downloading everything to the desktop. This shortly became inconvenient, and while I could copy everything between the computers, I didn’t really enjoy it, and it was becoming a pain in my ass to run the sync. Not to mention webmail when you have one account is fine, but when you have 5 or 10 (long story) you want to shoot someone.

    I’ve always known what IMAP did, but for whatever reason it never appealed to me. Basically, where POP3 downloads the email to your computer, IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) leaves it on the server and allows you to synchronize every time you access it.

    E-mail clients using IMAP generally leave messages on the server until the user explicitly deletes them. This alets multiple clients to access the same mailbox. Most e-mail clients support either POP3 or IMAP to retrieve messages; however, fewer Internet Service Providers (ISPs) support IMAP. Basically POP3 offers access to a mail drop. IMAP4 offers access to the mail store.

    Now there are downsides to IMAP. Once you delete that email and purge it, it’s gone. Forever. Quando is gone forever, sire (Only my father will get that reference *sigh*). And if your ISP takes a walk, you lose all your email forever. Except I really don’t keep a whole lot in my email any more, when I get around to it. I store bills and stuff for a while, but that’s really it. Everything else gets saved offline to a folder or deleted. If it’s something I need access to from multiple places, maybe I’ll keep it in the email for a while. But usually not.

    So for now, it’s IMAP for me.

  • Pilot Fish Woes

    This is a true story. (more…)

  • Surfin’ Safari

    Safari 3 beta came out for Mac and Windows. Naturally I download Safari 3 for Mac last night and test it out, planning to pick it up on Windows when at work.

    On a Macintosh, things are like a pleasing mix of Firefox and Safari. There are a couple bugs I dislike (like Firefox’s ‘Allow Popups from…’), but I adore that it now alerts me ‘Dude! You’re closing multiple tabs!’ if I quit, and ‘Hey, you’re entering text in this window, you sure you want to close it?’ if I close this tab. So on that note, yay.

    On Windows it sucks balls. Oh, it’s fine on my XP home edition, but as soon as you add in Windows wackiness of Roaming Profiles, and proxies, and it dies.

    Mac makes two critical errors:

    1) Not letting you manually adjust proxies. Picking it up from IE seems sensible, but having used IE and multiple other browsers, I can tell you it’s a bad idea. IE settings work for IE. Firefox has to be different, slightly, and so does Safari. So instead, they should default to IE, but allow you edit access.

    2) Preferences don’t grok roaming profiles. There’s no way around how huge this is. If you want Safari to be used in corporate America, you must allow for roaming profiles. This means either you let relative pathing do it’s job, or you allow the users to manually set profile locations. The latter plan isn’t really going to work, since Mac lives by the ‘Do everything simply and have the user do nothing.’

    My solutions are simple sounding, and they won’t fix everything, but it’ll get them started.

    Hey, Mac, I used to build MSIs!