Mon, Feb 1, 2010 11:25 PM
In my last post about CSS layout and ads, a commenter brought up that the dealnews.com web site did not handle extensions like Ad Block very gracefully. To which I responded that I don't care. To which he responded with download counts. Well, the reason I don't care is that ad impressions when compared to page views on dealnews.com are within 2% of each other. So, at best, less than 2% of users are blocking ads. In reality, that is going to include some DNS failures, network issues, or something else. I would bet our logo graphic has about the same difference. The reality is that normal people don't block ads. In my opinion, if you make your money by working on the web, you shouldn't either. I should add that this site's (my geeky blog) ad views was about 16% lower than the recorded page views. So, geeks block ads more I guess. But, geeks have dominated the web for a long time.
This got me thinking that I had not look at the browser stats very much lately. dealnews has a very odd graph on browser statistics. We do not follow the industry averages. Our audience is dominantly tech savy (that does not mean geeks). Our users don't just use the stuff that is installed on the computer when they get it. This kind of proves my point about ad blocking even more. We have non-moron users and they still don't block ads.
| Browser |
% of Visits |
| Internet Explorer |
42.34% |
| Firefox |
36.94% |
| Safari |
9.55% |
| Chrome |
8.34% |
| Mozilla |
1.46% |
| Opera |
0.68% |
| Netscape |
0.41% |
| Avant |
0.08% |
| Camino |
0.06% |
| IE Mobile |
0.02% |
As you can see, Firefox is very prevalent on our site. We generally test in IE7/8, Firefox 3, Safari and Chrome. I will occasionally test a major change in Opera. Typically, well formed HTML and CSS works fine in Opera so everything is all good.
As for operating systems, Windows still dominates, but we have more Macs than the average site I would guess.
| OS |
% of Visits |
| Windows |
82.95% |
| Macintosh |
11.27% |
| iPhone |
3.80% |
| Linux |
1.19% |
| Android |
0.17% |
Interesting that iPhone beats out Linux. That is just another sign to me that Linux is still not a real choice for real people. Be that a product issue from OEMs or user choice. That is debatable. It is notable that most of our company uses Macs. I don't think we make up a speck of that traffic though. If we did, our home state of Alabama would be our most dominant. It isn't. We are very typical in that regard, California is number one. We only have one employee there.
Tue, Sep 2, 2008 02:39 PM
So, Google Chrome is out. If you don't know, it's Google's new browser. I downloaded it on my Windows XP machine and tried it out. I found this curious thing in the options.
So, I thought, I will click "Learn more" to see what they are watching. I get this.
So, I unchecked the box. Let's hope the premature launch is the reason there is no more information out there.
UPDATE: The page comes up now and says:
Information that's sent to Google includes crash reports and statistics on how often you use Google Chrome features. When you choose to accept a suggested query or URL in the address bar, the text you typed and the corresponding suggestion is sent to Google. Google Chrome doesn't send other personal information, such as name, email address, or Google Account information.
So, if you use their suggestions, they know it. And it tracks what features you use. Hmm, I think I will disable.
Fri, Jul 11, 2008 09:25 PM
So, I know I just had a kid, but I am at a friends house helping with some computer issues. This is the friend that took my wife to the hospital and sat with her until I got there, after all. She is also the friend that took my other five kids in while we were at the hospital. So, I owe her big time.
First a little backstory. A few years ago, I started installing Firefox and Thunderbird on my non-technical friend's computers. I would label the Firefox icon "Internet" and the Thunderbird icon "Email". This made it simple for them. I would also install OpenOffice on those machines that did not have the full Microsoft Office package and show them that it could do all the same things that they needed MS Office for.
Anyhow, I am helping this friend by installing XP Service Pack 3 and remove some malware that somehow got on here. While waiting on Windows, I notice that my usual pattern of installing FF, TB and OOO.org are all done on this machine. What is cool is that I have never used this computer before. This one is new to me. So, that means this friend sought out Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice all on her own and installed them for her family the same way I always have.
Now, I am not naive enough to think that my friend suddenly understands Open Source. She is not using it because she wants to be a part of the open source movement. But, it does make me feel good to help spread open source if even from the user perspective. It is also a testament to those applications and how far they have come.
Thu, Jul 26, 2007 02:52 AM
Day one is complete. Portland is great as always. Its really day 1 1/2 since we got in at 1PM yesterday. That allowed us to go to the MySQL/Zend party last night. Great party by those guys. Touched based with old friends and made some new ones.
I kind of session hopped today. Of note, I attended Andi Gutmans PHP Security talk which really had little to do with PHP. Like Larry Wall's onion metaphor, Andi presented an onion metaphor for security. I stopped in for a while on the SOLR talk. It looks neat. I like that it is a REST interface to Lucene. If we were not using Sphinx already I might take a longer look. But, we like Sphinx and, SOLR and Lucene are Java. Not that there is anything wrong with that, we just don't use Java a lot, so its just one more thing that would be out of the norm. I admit I spent a good bit of time in what is being called the "hallway track" working on some code. Work does not stop just because you are at a conference.
I got to hang out with Jay Pipes of the MySQL Community team a good bit. We talked about the MySQL forums (which or course runs Phorum) and how they want to improve them. They would like to see tagging, user and post rating and some other things. Some good things will come out of that. Hopefully they have some of the tagging stuff done already at MySQL Forge and can contribute that code to Phorum, saving us time.
I hosted the Caching for fun and profit BoF. It was not packed, but it was a good time. The MySQL BoF was at the same time, so we lost some folks to that I am sure. They had beer and pizza. Brad Fitzpatrick did come by and contribute. Thanks Brad. It was mostly the same stuff you get on the memcached mailing list. "How do we expire lots of cache at once?" Questions about different clients. Stuff like that. It kind of turned into a memcached BoF, but I tried to share the dealnews experience with the attendees including our MySQL Cluster pushed caching.
I have met many readers of both dealnews and this blog (hi to you) while here. Glad to know that both my professional work and my personal work are of use to folks. The demographic at this conference is dead on for dealnews. Maybe I can get them to sponsor it next year. That would be cool.
I say every year that I want to present "next year". Something always keeps me from doing it. Usually its just not having time to prep for it. By the time I think about it, the call for papers has passed. I really want to get it done this time. We shall see I suppose.
We went to the Sun party tonight. It was a good time. There was beer that was free as in beer. More hanging with friends and talking about all kinds of stuff. Now, all you Slashdotters sit down. I saw people from the PostgreSQL and MySQL teams drinking beer and having fun together. OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!! See, the people that really matter in those projects don't bicker and fight about which is better. They just drink beer and have a good time together.
Anyhow, I will blog more after day 2. There won't be a day 3 as I have to catch an 11:30 flight back home. That is usually how it goes. Not sure why they book anything on Friday really. Even O'Reilly has its "after party" on Thursday night. Its late, and I need sleep.
Thu, Jun 28, 2007 11:12 PM
There have been several posts about HTML Purifier 2.0 lately. I did not look to closely at it until I saw this post on our Phorum support forum. Seems the creator of HTML Purifier has chosen Phorum for his site. I hope that means it met his standards for HTML and security. He has posted some questions about the Phorum core. We always welcome a fresh mind.
He is writing a module for Phorum to allow straight HTML in Phorum posts. We have an HTML module already, but its quite basic compared to what you can do with his library. Several people have wanted to use the WYSIWYG text editors that are out there. This should/could open that up to people. I don't see the Phorum core ever having one, but that is what modules are for.
Sun, Apr 15, 2007 01:51 AM
A buddy needed a quick report to see if one of his users was slamming his site. I got a little carried away and wrote a PHP script (plus some awk and grep) to make a little report for him. I am sure it is full of bugs and will bring your server crashing down. So, use at your own risk.
$ ./bwreport.php -h
Usage: bwreport.php [-d YYYYMMDD] [-u URI] [-i HOST/IP] [-r REGEXP] [-v]
-d YYYYMMDD Date of the logs to parse. If no date provided, yesterday assumed.
-i IP/HOST Only report log lines with IP/HOST for host part of log line
-r REGEXP Only report log lines that match REGEXP. Should be a valid grep regexp
-u URI Only report log lines with URI match to URI
-v Verbose mode
http://www.phorum.org/downloads/bwreport.php.gz
Mon, Dec 4, 2006 06:40 PM
So, at dealnews, we are getting ready to launch a super secret thing (redesign beta preview) that requires us to use some cookie tricks. What we decided to do was to give our users a link to a page that would set a cookie. Then we configured our F5 BIG-IP load balancers to direct those users with the cookie set to a different pool (back end ip/port pairs). Its not an original idea. Yahoo! was doing something similar with their recent front page beta. In fact, that is where I got the idea.
Well, it worked great in testing with mod_rewrite (buying a $40k device for testing is not in the budget right now) on my local machine and on the test servers. We had no problems. However, when we turned it all on in production using the BIG-IP we got some unexpected results. We could go to the URL to set our cookie and our site would change. On the redesigned page, there is another link to switch you back. It simply deleted the cookie and redirected you. Since the cookie was gone, you would be back to the old design, right? WRONG! You were stuck. But, if you did not click on any links on the site for about, oh, 15 seconds, you would get back to the old design. I should say at this point that Safari was the only browser that did not do this. IE, Mozilla and Opera all had this problem.
Hmm, 15 seconds. That is the default KeepAliveTimeout in Apache. I took a chance and disabled keep alive in Firefox (about:config, search for keep, set to false). BAM! It all worked like a charm. It seemed that IE, FF and Opera all keep your keep alive connection open even after the page is done loading. And because the BIG-IP determined which pool you are connected to at connection time, you stayed connected with the new pool rather than switching back. And, as long as you kept clicking around on our site, you would keep that connection open.
As for a solution, we decided to let Apache do the work for us. We didn't want to tell the BIG-IP to start disconnecting users on every request. Instead, we used a Location directive and SetEnv to set the nokeepalive environment variable only when users access the page that sets/unsets the cookie. Now Apache sends the Connection: close header and the browsers comply. You can see an immediate difference too. Firefox for example has a noticable pause while it closes the connection and makes a new one. I am going to dig around in the BIG-IP manual some more to see if there is anything we can do to make this work at the load balancer layer. But, I don't really want my load balancers spending CPU cycles on something that will not be an issue once this redesign is launched.
Wed, Aug 16, 2006 04:23 PM
So, one of the things I always use in Firefox is the auto Google Feeling Lucky feature. If you don't know what I mean, then load Firefox and type php in the address bar. You will most likely go to http://www.php.net or a mirror of it. What is happening is Firefox is sending the words you type to the Google Feeling Lucky URL. That feature at Google then redirects you to the top ranked site for those terms. Its really handy for the PHP Manual for example. Just type php strtotime. You should be taken to the PHP Manual page for strtotime. Its really handy.
The only problem I have is that I like to use Yahoo! for search. There are a couple of reasons. One of the biggest is because they support the PHP community so much. Yahoo has Instant Search. They consider it to be an answer for Feeling Lucky, but it does me no good in this case.
I thought I was stuck until I discovered that Yahoo! offers RSS versions of searches. So, I wrote yahoo_luck.php. Its a simple little script that uses SimpleXML to grab a Yahoo! RSS search result and forward you on. I did put some backup in there for times when, for some reason, Yahoo! would not answer. Perhaps some of you Yahoo! guys in the PHP world can poke someone about that.
The one downside is that you will need your own web server. I tried to come up with some sort of javascript to do this. But, alas, I am not the JS wizard I wish I was. I am not even sure if the keywords.URL setting in Firefox could use JS.
To use this, just stick it on a server and replace keyword.URL in your Firefox about:config with http://www.example.com/yahoo_luck.php?s=. Enjoy.
