mysiteonline™ - Work

Statistics and Appreciation

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:10:50 -0800

So I've been working on the statistics tracking "RefStats" (which apparently I'll have to rename; naming conflict with another project) and have given a much fonder appreciation for those people who work with creating statistic tracking services for a living (or a side project). It's ridiculous.

You record a hit, and a time, and perhaps some possible extra information depending on what your application is actually tracking. But just with the hit and a time, there's an exorbitant amount of ways to display information gathered from this data. How many hits were received on Thursdays? What were the average number of hits per weekend days in the month of March? Which day/hour of the month had the most hits? What percentage of hits were counted on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday - comparatively?

As the designer/developer of such a tool, you need to be aware of these types of questions. But that's not even half of the challenge. You also need to try to anticipate how your customers/clients will be using your application, and which of these reports will be the most important to them (if you're going to release reports in stages rather than do it all at once). You also need to try to reuse your code, so hopefully one querying method can be used to gather multiple reports, rather than a single method for each report (which although would be nice for modularity, a lot of these things are doing practically the exact same query with just a different WHERE clause, or different fields in the SELECT clause).

There's also the thought of interoperability of the data. What if you want an API for your application? What if you want the charting tool to be able to pull data from your primary querying method that serves all other aspects of your site so you don't have to develop two (or more) separate entities that are essentially getting the same information but rendering it differently.

There sure are some intelligent people and teams out there, such as Dan Grossman (http://www.dangrossman.info) of W3Counter fame, Laurent Destailleur of the original king of web stats: AWStats, and of course there's the team behind Google Analytics. These are examples of some of the big boys of analytics and by no means on the same miniscule level that I am even attempting to recreate; but the sheer fact of the amount of planning and ingenuity that goes in to such a project is simply mind boggling to me.

Anyway, read more to view some example images of the web reports that I have thus far - some development is still needed (note the disabled form fields, and I need to add a range option even though it already works), and the UI is not complete.
Continue reading "Statistics and Appreciation"

Reference Stats: Client "done"

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:18:55 -0700

The Adobe AIR portion of the Reference Statistics Tracker is "done" (and has been for a week or two now). I just got approval over the extremely basic wireframe layout of the backend (web-based) tool that actually shows the stats data. Although it's basically only storing a very small amount of data, there are so many different ways that the data itself could be shown. If you think about how Web Analytics software can show so many different things; also think about what stats you have with it...it's basically a huge (textual) database of single line entries - the address, the referrer, the time, the visitor's IP, and a response code...yet there are tons of different ways to show that data.

It's a simplistic tool with huge possibilities. I aim to be rather simple for the first iteration out of the door.

Speaking of the first iteration out of the door - I ended up copying/pasting a LOT of the internal code in the Adobe AIR client to finish it. Having a local backup database in case of internet connection failure was a "last minute" additional "requirement" that I hadn't anticipated in the planning process, so I had to hack a lot of ugly stuff in to the code - and to finish it without a lot of it being rewritten, well... Thankfully, I do intend to upgrade it, as I left out one (actually two) important features.

1. Remote upgrade.
(2. Specify end-points to receive dynamic setup info.)

I left out the upgrade script because (1)I've heard it's a resource hog, and is a pain to work with, and...(2)I know I'll need to manually upgrade our library's PCs at the next version because of DeepFreeze anyway. (I left out the portion of the settings because I'm not yet ready to release the code as open source just yet, so I can hard code that stuff for now.)

I will post pictures of both the client and the web tool after it's been in use for a couple weeks - I'd gather that'll probably be about a month from now (I can't start work on the web panel until Monday, and it'll probably take me about two weeks to finish).

Using jQuery and Google Analytics to track Outbound Clicks

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:53:53 -0700

Most solutions that I've found for tracking outbound links with Google Analytics have been to send the link through a local file that would then be able to be tracked by Google, sending a query string as your end-result location. I never really liked that.

The other day, I accidentally found someone else's solution to use jQuery and Google Analytics for outbound link tracking.

The following code snippet is what I ended up with for my own use (so it doesn't add an actual visit/pageview to my own site's ranking):

What's happening here?
$(document).ready(function(){ - when the DOM is ready, do the following...

$('a[href^="http"]:not([href*="'+domain+'"])').click(function(){ - whenever a hyperlink is clicked that does not contain our domain anywhere in the URL, run the following... (this includes any subdomain, further string trickery would be required to keep subdomains listed in the same category)

pageTracker._trackEvent('Outbound', 'click', $(this).attr('href')); -- Run Google's _trackEvent method to register an event. Typically the 2nd parameter passed in is an "action". In my final version, I changed "click" to be $(document.location) instead, so that I can tell where people are clicking these outbound links from.

You can read more about the Google method "_trackEvents" from the Google Documentation on Google Analytics. Oh, and...about the commented out code, that's more of a reminder to myself, if I ever want to track PDF or DOC file clicks on my own domain, but the code would have to be revised a bit for that to work. Also, make sure you change the domain string to whatever you'd like to track (a specific subdomain, or your whole domain).

Reference Stat Tracking - UI Almost Complete

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:53:56 -0700

Work has finally progressed on the StatTracker. It's taken me a little bit of time to get accustomed to Event Driven programming, but I think I got the hang of it. To be honest, it was kind of nice after I understood what was going on (and created a flowchart to more easily see what I needed to code for). It forces me to go back to my OOP roots in C++. I've been doing procedural PHP for so long, I almost forgot how to spread procedure calls in to separate, more manageable blocks. I now call one function upon application instantiation that runs all other functions, depending on iteration.

Anyhow, the last post I had, I showed a mockup in Photoshop. Here's a live running example of the UI (built directly from the mockup):

Reference Statistics Tracker for SSPL

What's done?

CakePHP Web-based backend
Adobe AIR application, can be installed on Linux, OSX, Windows
Use jQuery JavaScript library with Adobe AIR
XMLHTTPRequest to backend server from AIR app to dynamically build the UI

What small things do I need to fix?

Currently, at least in Windows, if you have a :hover state on a button, moving the mouse to the transparent portion of the window does not trigger the mouseout event and disable the :hover state. I will have to overcome this either by JavaScript, AIR properties, or some HTML/CSS trickery.
There is currently no indication that an action has occurred properly (did I press it properly? *click click click CLICK!!!*) as it's such a simple application, I felt it was unnecessary. My boss basically told me I was stupid (with a grin), and I agree.
As of right now, the project only supports up to 9 different question types as the background colors are hardcoded in CSS. This will need to be dynamically coded at a later date. Our library only has a need for 4, so I'm not too overly concerned with this prior to me releasing the code.

What's left?

~~Attaching onClick events to the buttons to submit a value to the server (very easy, and is the next step)~~
~~Setting a modal dialog for the Text button to submit data to the server~~
The hard part: If saving to the server fails for whatever reason, store the data in an internal SQLite DB - constantly check the server at predetermined intervals, and once connection succeeds again, upload all data in the internal DB back to the server, and empty the local DB store
Backend will (eventually) provide numeric as well as graph/chart-type statistics (I think I'll use ezComponent's ezGraph, I was going to use Open Flash Chart, but Flash based data does not print, and I'd imagine our department heads will want to use the statistics in their monthly reports)

I switched tooltip libraries from SimpleTip to qTip, both jQuery tooltip libraries written by Craig Thompson (http://craigsworks.com/). qTip was a rewrite of SimpleTip. It didn't take much time to switch, but there was a bug that he only just fixed this morning that was preventing me from moving forward. Getting the window to properly display in the bottom right portion of the viewport was also "fun", but I'm learning, which is good. Unfortunately, it's all untested in Linux and/or OSX as our library only uses Microsoft Windows, but I can test OSX functionality at home at a later date; or better yet, once this goes up in SVN, anyone else can test it out too, and possibly supply fixes or updates (or if I use GitHub, create their own fork)!

Suggestions, comments, feedback?

Adobe AIR and its Security Model

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:24:01 -0700

I hate it. Until you start working with it and messing around with it, the documentation is terribly confusing. I kept trying to find an example (for quite some time) of how to use AJAX from within the main application sandbox (the initial "window" that opens upon run) to an external server. Almost all examples kept referencing local files from within the application, or used Flex which has a different mechanism in going out and grabbing information.

Jonathan Snook recently mentioned a talk he had given about plain old HTML/JS development of AIR applications in his blog, and...knowing it was my golden opportunity, I had to ask him if he knew of any examples of how to use AJAX in the main application window on an external domain with regard to the obscurities of the sandbox security.

He simply told me (paraphrased), "There is no security restriction on the main application sandbox. It should just work." Oooooooh, boy. Don't I feel stupid when I went and tried it and it worked just fine. I tried to PayPal him $10 for his time in responding, but apparently PayPal won't let me send money from my own account unless I link my credit card or bank account.

Some of you may remember my Reference Statistics Tracker Application that I have discussed in the past; that is the Adobe AIR application that I needed this assistance with... I had that part of the project (Reference Statistic Tracker) on hold simply because I couldn't figure out how to make a remote call, which sort of hinged on a majority of the GUI since the GUI is dynamically built. Awesome. At least I can continue now - especially now that the Staff Site's authentication is done. Luckily, I found a better tooltip plugin to use for the GUI in the meantime.

I'll probably create either a GitHub account, or create a public SVN repository on a subdomain here that can hold different projects I'm working on, if anyone's interested once this gets closer to a usable state. Any immediate preferences?

A computational research professional?

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 07:52:05 -0700

It seems that the days of the librarian (as the field stands now) may be numbered. A new product dubbed "Wolfram Alpha", will be released in May (the Alpha) that intends to actually formulate answers to questions posed to it. They claim it's much more powerful than Google as it actually answers the questions, not finding possible pages that may have answers in it.

Source: http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lst-4b/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-be-as-important-as-google

Reference Statistics Tracking

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:34:03 -0800

So it's been quite awhile since I've discussed anything about my little Adobe AIR project - with good reason, I'm a top-down programmer. If I don't know the language, I need to know enough to come up with a good plan of attack so that I'm not coding garbage that would have to be completely reprogrammed from scratch 2 months later (6 months? ...well...). In that end, I've been trying to find good documentation. The Adobe site had the v1.1 runtime documentation, but I couldn't find the newer v1.5 runtime docs. The library system had a book or two, so I took one out. It wasn't that great. Our library got one specifically for v1.5. It was better, but still not quite what I was looking for (though it made some more basic things easier to understand).

Eventually I found the v1.5 runtime documentation on Adobe's website. It was 433 pages long, in a compiled PDF. Yay. I fall asleep after reading two paragraphs. "This won't be easy," I thought to myself. Well, approximately 200 interruptions later, I finally finished the documentation and I've finished a basic mockup for the user interface. I intend for it to be (upon application instantiation) automatically positioned at the user's bottom right viewport. We'll probably set it in the Program's menu Startup folder.

Example mockup image:

Reference Statistics Tracker for SSPL

Note: The hover property of the button is not set in this mockup (I rushed a little), and Safari's rounded corners (Adobe AIR uses a version of WebKit for it's HTML rendering engine) are much cleaner than Photoshop's.
Continue reading "Reference Statistics Tracking"

Yay for hiatus.

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 10:51:26 -0800

So, after an interruption of work, first with attempting to fix a core bug with CakePHP to help fix a bug with my own application on our staff site (and failing miserably to create a unit test case so it's not yet fixed), and then being asked to create a Tri-fold pamphlet for a series that our library was putting on (with no knowledge of the series itself other than its name, and the 6 programs), I've been a little busy - oh, and holidays, traveling, and more traveling. (Gonna be out in Arizona for a week starting on the 17th.) Fun times, fun times. I am back to reading up on more stuff about Adobe Air. Our library just got the O'Reilly "Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook" and it does have some pretty good examples. Unfortunately, even though extremely confusing and too technically written, I think the official Adobe Help documentation is probably a more thorough resource for me. IT'S SO DRY.

Either way, skimming through the cookbook, I already found a few notes to jot down, such as how to access information about the current monitor's resolution in order to set the location for my application (when using AIRAliases.js with HTML/JS creation):

air.Screen.mainScreen.visibleBounds.width
air.Screen.mainScreen.bounds.height

...and there was a nice and easy example of how to use custom "chrome" with HTML/JS minimize and close buttons:

onClick="window.nativeWindow.minimize()"
onClick="window.nativeWindow.close()"

I've got the internal SQLite chapter bookmarked and may take a quick look at it later if I ultimately decide to deal with network failure to the production DB store or not.

Statistics on answering patrons' questions.

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:34:47 -0800

So I've been asked by the Adult Services department head to come up with a means to retrieve and store statistics for "Questions Answered at the Public Service Desks". Currently, they're using a pen and paper approach from a template created in Microsoft Word. Each staff member (reference librarian) at the desks (currently using the paper document) has to print out one sheet per day (therefore, the Reference Desk has 2 sheets each day, Information Desk has one sheet) and will tally (slash slash slash slash, cross) the number of questions asked, separated by hour(s) (9-11, 11-1, 1-3, 3-5, 5-9). There's also a section for notes such as "We need the following items...", "Interesting Questions", and "Suggested books/items to order".

He mostly wanted a way to reduce the paper trail and become more "green". All those papers are then returned to his desk at the end of the day. He tallies the results at the end of the month. That's approximately 3*5*4 = 60 full pieces of paper to go through to count (by hand) all of the stats, as well as read (all at once) the comments and/or notes. Granted, I don't know if he keeps a running tally (one would hope), but either way, that's a lot of unnecessary work.

Since other desks/departments may find this useful, I've extended the schema in the database that will hold the information to account for that. Although it can all be managed via a web page (and is currently working as such in skeletal form -- thank you, CakePHP and 5 minutes of time), I've opted for a better solution. Since it'd be unruly to require a webpage to be open at all times, or dealing with load-times on a webpage from a favorite or desktop shortcut, I'll be developing a dynamically created UI using Adobe Air to allow for a desktop application. All it will require from the staff member is to either click on a button (and then verify -- requested from the department head), or fill in a text box. Upon installation the application will verify which public service desk it is at and use that information from then on.

The department heads in charge of each service desk (in case any other departments wish to use this) will then be able to view reports and statistical data from a staff intranet page, as the database will be maintained on our webserver. I'll probably integrate it with Open Flash Chart like I did on a personal project - it turned out really nice looking and was easily stylized (with a little understanding of its settings).

Hopefully when all done I can post some screenshots of the first draft of the final product. It's meant to be very simple, but nice with features...we'll have to see if I deal with connection issues to the database (as Adobe Air also has a local file store and can check on server responses). Either way, I have a lot of reading ahead of me on Adobe Air now that the database schema is complete. The statistics will come last...but we should have hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly break downs.

CoverFlow Fun at Work

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:39:02 -0700

I had some fun mixing a couple different JavaScript technologies and web services together to create something "interesting", and helpful for our Children's Room.

Introducing the Saratoga Springs Public Library's Children's Room Photo Gallery!

For the services, I am using Google's AJAX API to serve up my jQuery library, rather than me having to deal with keeping it upgraded and gzip/compressing it. You can read more about it here. For the photographs, I am using Flickr, as many other libraries do. It was one of the easiest and quickest that I could use with a nice desktop-based management tool that also didn't hog network bandwidth while searching for new photos (ala Picasa, or Microsoft Live Photo Gallery). Now staffers in that department can create their own photo sets (or photo categories) and manage their own images.

For the JS effects, I am using two separate libraries. Since I'm using Google's AJAX API to serve up jQuery I'll start with that one... I'm using ThickBox to show a larger version image of a thumbnail when clicked on. The nice things about Thickbox is that (1)it integrates with the other script I'm using, (2)it automatically resizes the images to fit (if too big for the viewport), and (3)is very versatile in its use of modal dialog support. The other library I am using is something called "ImageFlow" written by Finn Rudolph, which is one of the best JS-based CoverFlow implementations I have seen. The Official ImageFlow website isn't as fancy as someone else's implementation, so you may wish to check out the version that also has YouTube integration, and automatic rotation/slideshow.

I know there's currently no way to get from that page back to our home page or other areas of our website. To be honest, I'm not entirely concerned about that at the moment, I have many more pressing non-web-related projects of higher importance (at work) to work on, unfortunately.

Update: Apparently ThickBox is not being fired with the newest photoset, and I'm not sure why...it worked before a staff member updated the textual descriptions of the images, because I tried it. No idea why it's not working now - anyone have any ideas?

Twine: The Semantic Puzzle (RDFa Group)

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:46:51 -0700

From my new subscription to the Twine (data?) service, I subscribed to the RDFa group to hear, and read about new (or interesting) technologies around the web. It's been quite some time since I had heard about Freebase Parallax (last read about in the Web4Lib digest), and when reading over the article in my Twine digest email, I took a second look. The video demo really showed its power. But, to understand the Semantic Web (RDFa), I'd suggest anyone interested read over that article first. It discusses ideologies on how one should be able to find information and data over the web.

A Good Data Browser Allows You to Navigate the Knowledge Space by Car
...and...
Twine, if you're interested - currently in private Beta.

NCIP, Standards, and why we need RFCs

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:45:23 -0700

So, in attempting to figure out this rather obnoxiously generically defined protocol, I've found that our vendor's implementation of the protocol is not what I would have expected from first attempts. Properly formatted XML with line breaks to denote a new tag in the structure is apparently not desired as the query fails. If I remove all newlines (and I did remove all leading whitespace, though I'd imagine it was possibly unnecessary?) the query was successful. ...not to mention that a test was given where we would access it using Telnet under Microsoft's DOS. Well... MS-DOS prompt's telnet seems to be quite finicky and doesn't work as expected. Using PuTTy seemed to work OK though. Go figure. I'm glad I have that for SSH to our host otherwise I wouldn't have thought of it.

Without an RFC to describe exactly how communication is to be sent, received, and expected...bug testing has become a chore and a bore...not to mention that in trying to get a PHP socket client working just does not seem to be working. I can read information sent from my test server, but I cannot send data to the test server; though it works with PuTTy. If only it were a webservice with SOAP or something similar instead...which is probably what I'd extend this to do anyway, eventually...for use by the consortia.

Oh yes, NCIP v2 should be coming along within the year as well since I believe it's now been passed. Yay. Give me more technical specifications or an actual library example to work from! ARGH!

The Website has Launched

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:42:00 -0700

Well it's about time, the site is now live! As I've said in a previous post about this, it's not complete - all the content (sans images...which was almost all clipart) is directly from the old version of the site, just rearranged.

Put in use to this design are some rather obnoxiously tricky CSS tweaks along with JavaScript, Flash, and RSS feeds all pulled together to create a single site.

JavaScript:
sIFR
Dustin Diaz's SweetTitles (tooltips)
Homebrew DL list FAQ
NiftyCube
AmberJack Tour Script (temporarily)
...and some other various stuff...

CSS:
Tripoli CSS "Framework"
Stuart Landridge's Image Replacement Technique

Flash:
Monoslideshow ($20 purchase, site license)
sIFR

...and lots of HTML! Ha! I also used the WeatherBug API, and MagpieRSS (I used my own SimpleXML RSS reader but I didn't write a caching method, Magpie seemed faster and it already had caching, so...), as well as a "Beta_RSS" feed of our Event Calendar (which is incorrectly serving non-ISO-8859-1 as ISO-8859-1, causing problems I can't figure out how to fix. Regardless, it looks pretty!

Now, to wait for the dust to clear and the smoke to settle (all the little things that bug me that I will fix, but aren't important) so I can move on to updating the content and more visual hierarchy of things. After that I should start talking about programming some more here.

New Feature from Polaris

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 07:44:47 -0800

Clarification for those of you that read my blog for non-library-related information: this is library related.

I just got an email from one of the sales associates (I somehow got added to the list) on a new product that can be incorporated into the PAC: NoveList Select.

Polaris is pleased to offer NoveList Select - a quick and easy way for patrons to find books similar to those that interest them. NoveList Select pulls from a database of over 4 million titles and retrieves only books that are included in your collection. What's more, a "Find more like this" link appears right in the PAC and sorts results by popularity, making it easier for readers to find additional books they will enjoy.

I can't recall if other PAC software does this either by default or with a company-supported plugin (I know there are third party plugins), but I'm quite happy to hear about this. I'd imagine it works under a library consortia running Polaris just fine, so now I guess I just have to hope our consortia decides to take a serious look at this.

Coming to a Library Near Me!

nospam@example.com (Brendon Kozlowski) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:32:14 -0800

I've been rather quiet on my blog for the past few months, and I might be for the next few as well. The reasoning is simply because I haven't had a whole lot of interesting things to talk about, I've mostly been designing and redesigning our "new" website's look and feel. I've been quite embarrassed to tell people where I work simply because the website was not of my own creation and did not reflect my talents. As I am a one man band here (except for PC repair and networking, my boss does that and I assist him), I do graphic work, design, programming, cost/benefit analysis, future planning/research for technology, and a slew of other mindless yet time consuming things -- I haven't been able to work through this as quickly as I had envisioned. Not only that, but getting a consensus in a new design, knowing that everyone deciding on it had liked it (and not just thought that anything is better than our current design) was a difficult task. I'm still having trouble getting any help on actual content...due to this fact, it's more of a visual redesign than an overhaul, which is quite unfortunate.

Regardless, since I'm itching to show off the website, I'll give a small treat in its place...
Continue reading "Coming to a Library Near Me!"