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Just as I thought I couldn’t get any more addicted to stats… I’ve stumbled on another 3rd party stat tool at Reinvigorate.net, which is different enough to Chartbeat to be useful on its own but not instead of.
There are a few similarities, I can see who is on the site, what page they’re on, where they’re from etc, etc. With the added bonus of being able to drill down to users by location, OS, browser. Most of the kind of stuff you can find on Analytics, except these are users on your site right now.
The dashboard view is nowhere near as instant as Chartbeat’s, you certainly have to poke around to find the bits of info that you want, although it is much more detailed. However, where it does shit on Chartbeat from a great height is with its click heat maps.
Using this view of any of your popular pages, you can see exactly where users are clicking on your pages and make adjustments as necessary, to either put links where users are expecting them, or make them more visible where they aren’t. It’s surprising how often users click on people’s names expecting them to be links as well as clicking on headings and photos expecting to be taken somewhere else.
We’ve already been able to make several pages on Giant Digital sites more user friendly by making what looks clickable more clickable.
Reinvigorate is definitely a tool to put in your tool box, it provides you with detailed statistical data above and beyond what’s available on Analytics, teamed with Chartbeat you will have enough information at your fingertips to keep users on your site interested and providing them with content where they expect it to be.
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I have a new addiction, I’ve been dabbling with stats for a while, I started out messing with log reports, then moved onto Analytics, and for a while I thought I had control of it, but now I’m onto the hard stuff. Chartbeat.com, so addictive, it should be banned.
Chartbeat is a new SaaS from the people behind bit.ly and tweetdeck and funded by the people behind Twitter, Tumblr and Superfeedr, so it comes with good pedigree. It’s a real time analytics app that let’s you see who is on your site right now, what page they’re on, where they came from, what they were searching for and where they are. It makes you feel like you’re driving your site, giving you real time feedback straight to your fingertips.
You can literally tailor content to your users interest for any given moment, helping you build site traffic and user loyalty. All the Giant staff are already completely addicted, I feel like a drug dealer having introduced them to this crack rock version of Analytics.
The great thing about it is you no longer have to wait for Analytics to update the following day, you can see what’s happening now, RIGHT NOW!
I can’t see Google letting this go though, they’re bound to copy this, if they weren’t already thinking of it, it’s such an invaluable tool.
There are some shortcomings, you can’t drill down to users and there’s not much granular control over stats over a longer period of time. That said, it’s still early days and I can see this tool developing in leaps and bounds as more and more sign up to the service. They’re already claiming it to be used by:
which is a pretty impressive line up!
There is also an API, which I’m yet to explore fully, but you can basically get real time stats right onto your sites, so you can let your users see what’s hot right now. Huffington Post and Mashable already implement similar widgets where they show what’s trending and using the API from chartbeat.com will enable a lot of site developers to add the same usability, which is a lot cooler than just having a box showing what’s got the most hits over a longer period of time. There’s certainly a lot of exploration Giant will be doing in that area as we have time to include it into our sites.
I’m extremely impressed with what I’ve seen so far, I just hope I can keep my dirty little secret under wraps.
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We’re currently in the process of rebranding Giant Digital, or more accurately, creating our brand for the first time. I’ve found as our interaction with other companies has increased (mostly with agencies) there is a need to have continuity across the Giant Digital company.
As the company grew out of Gigwise.com, we tended to only use the company name (formerly GiEnt) in passing as we were more well known for our sites than as an umbrella company, and for that we didn’t really need a seperate brand. However as our visibility as a network has grown with the addition of our new sites and other partner sites that we work with, there has been a need for the company to have its own distinct identity.
We have hired a fantastic identity designer who is based in London, a guy called Kevin Macey who is friends with our sales and marketing head honcho, but is also responsible for some well reputed brand design for A Little Bird and degradable.net. We’re in the first throes of getting this done so there’s not much to report yet, but check out his work and his portfolio site.
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Add Comment »I remember when I went to buy my first brand new bike, it was a Raleigh Team Burner BMX. My dad, younger brother and myself headed off to some bike shop in Manchester and we chose the same bike only with different colour seats. I had a blue seat and my little bro chose a white seat. BMXs were great for customization and personalization, but as an adult your cycling options become a lot more limited. Every bike I’ve bought since then, never roused the same level of excitement. However, things are set to change for me and many others.
Bikebyme.com is a beautiful Swedish website that allows you to choose the colours of the parts on your bike. The colour choices are cool as fuck and the resulting bike is the most unique looking, personal thing ever. I don’t know whether it’s the process of choosing the look of your own bits and pieces or whether bikebyme.com have provided the lushest colour choices, but the resulting bike is the most desirable looking thing I’ve laid my eyes on since I met my girlfriend.
You can select frame, seat, tire, rims, handles and even chain colour. Here is my beautiful new bike:
This is my dream bike!
What’s really interesting about bikebyme.com is how they’ve brought something very web based into the real world. Selecting the colour things is a common on certain websites, after all it was what made MySpace a site worth visiting. Bringing an every day web concept into the real world will surely become a much more common process as companies chase profits further down the longtail and consumers come to expect a much higher level of choices. Nike and Converse have made designing your own unique trainers a common process, t-shirt design has been around for years and it’s just as easy to design your own car or house.
The only limit to this kind of process will be our imaginations. Meanwhile, get to bikebyme.com and get on your bike.
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Add Comment »We host all of our sites on Amazon AWS and have a shared server that we use for development and our smaller sites, but occasionally friends ask me to help them set up a site or a blog and putting them on our servers isn’t always practical. I’ve recently found a solution when faced with the dilemma of helping a friend that assumes I have unlimited hosting supplies, it’s a cloud based hosting and development app called Kodingen.
The service allows you to set up your own hosting environment on their servers, and cleverly, the whole thing is more or less point and click (if you want it to be). You can, using one click installation, install a number of open source apps and solutions from their “app store”, including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB and MediaWiki. You can ftp to your hosting, control databases and edit your source code using Bespin, CodeMirror or Ymacs without having to leave the app environment.
You can code in all the open source languages: php, perl, python, django, ruby on rails, fastcgi AND there is even version control in 3 flavours.
I’m impressed with the easiness of setting up an account and getting up and running with an app. Installing WordPress is just a case of setting up an empty database and then clicking on installation, the WP setup process guides you through the rest as per normal.
No doubt, as Kodingen gets a name for itself, the service will get flooded with users and the way they operate will have to change, with perhaps there being a small fee after a trial period. From what I can see, the service is freemium, only requiring a paid account if ” you want to have a lot of storage and traffic, keep-alive domains etc.”
If you need some webspace to play around with some ideas, then head over there now and get started with a few clicks.
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Add Comment »I’ve come up against a few situations recently when I’ve been using a PC without Photoshop installed, so have stumbled across an amazing SaaS app called Pixlr Editor. The online service provides a decent version of Photoshop in the browser without you having to install a single thing.
Layout of the work area is almost exactly the same, with your tool palette available to the left and layers, navigator and history to the right. In fact so far, I haven’t been able to find something that is missing from the original Photoshop, only being a light user anyway.
You’re able to manipulate text, resize photos, blur, smudge, fill, add filters, adjust contrast and just about most other uses you will find in a full version of Photoshop.
If you were considering buying or pirating Photoshop but you’re not a heavy user then this is the solution for you. Pixlr have also provided plugins for Firefox and Chrome for screen grabbing from your browser window.
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3 Comments »We’ve been trialling aiCache, a software caching solution, for nearly two months now. AiCache sits in front of our load balancer and caches all our static files and pages limiting the amount of traffic to our app servers and more importantly, calls to our database.
We’ve had a few teething problems while setting up and adjusting for the various foibles of our sites, but now it’s tuned up it’s really handling things well. Last week we made a link on the home page of IMDB which sent us a huge amount of traffic over a 24 hour period. AiCache handled everything that was thrown at it without batting an eye lid.
If you’ve been running out of options, trying to keep your site up, then this is a recommended solution to your problems.
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1. How AWS Works
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud based service offering on demand web servers, storage, databases and other web services on Amazon’s secure and stable infrastructure. AWS can be managed using the Amazon’s browser based dashboard, via SSH or with third party browser plugins and web apps.
Using AWS allows you to avoid investment in your own infrastructure or costly contracted servers, as you only have to pay for the computing power, storage and bandwidth that you actually use. AWS gives developers access to the kind of computing power that would only be available to large corporations at a cost of what is less than your cup of coffee every day.
The AWS platform is a mature platform and extremely secure. All interactions are via key pairs and server instances can be managed using various security groups which can be limited to only the ports that are required for the app.
2. Scalable Servers
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is the scalable server part of the service that provides on demand virtualised server instances. Instances can be based on many different server setups in either Linux or Windows flavors as well as the option to use snapshots from various vendors or the community. You can also customise a base image and store that for future use. These snapshots are called AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) and are integral for launching load balanced app servers as quickly as possible.
Instances can be located in 3 locations to reduce latency for users, currently these locations are US West Coast, US East Coast and EU West which is based in Ireland.
3. Load Balancing
Amazon has a built in load balancing solution Elastic Load Balancing which can distribute incoming traffic across your EC2 instances, automatically scaling in response to incoming traffic.
4. Storage
Instances are semi-permanent and can be rebooted without losing any data or settings although you can turn off instances that are no longer required you will lose data stored on that instance unless it is stored on Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS).
EBS offers persistent storage for Amazon EC2 instances. EBS volumes provide off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of an instance. Volumes are highly available, highly reliable volumes that can be leveraged as an Amazon EC2 instance’s boot partition or attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance as a standard block device. When used as a boot partition, Amazon EC2 instances can be stopped and subsequently restarted, enabling you to only pay for the storage resources used while maintaining your instance’s state.
Amazon also provides a basic storage for static files called Simple Storage Service (S3). There are several benefits to S3:
- Scalable: Amazon S3 can scale in terms of storage, request rate, and users to support an unlimited number of web-scale applications.
- Reliable: Store data with up to 99.999999999% durability, with 99.99% availability.
- Fast: Amazon S3 is fast enough to support high-performance applications.
- Inexpensive: 15¢ per GB per month for first 50TB.
- Simple: Uploads can be made using a simple browser plugin or various APIs.
5. Content Delivery Network
S3 can also be partnered with CloudFront which is a content delivery network with low latency and high data transfer speeds. CloudFront caches files at a location nearest to the user. When a user requests a file they are routed to the nearest edge location reducing delivery times for the content. This can have a significant impact on image and video heavy sites.
6. Managing Cost Effectively
Pricing is extremely cost effective as you only need to pay for what you use. Pricing is based on hourly use of instances, bandwidth and amount of storage. The smallest Linux instance costs as little as 8.5¢.
AWS instances can be managed using third party scaling applications that monitor incoming traffic to your app server and based on polling times or CPU load can launch new app instances within a few minutes to cope with traffic demands. This ensures that you use only the computing power that you need and when the capacity is no longer required app instances are scaled down. Management of MySQL Masters and Slaves can also be managed in the same manner.
Typical Cloud Web App Set Up With Scalr
SCALR
1. Scalr
Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon’s EC2. Scalr helps you create and manage scalable infrastructure, providing pre-built images of load balancers, database servers, application and caching servers which can be customised to a developers needs and arranged into logical groups as farms.
Although Scalr has been released as an open source download, the SaaS version developed and maintained by Intridea is a stable, secure and cost effective way to manage your EC2 instances online.
Scalr monitors traffic to your app and brings up new instances to cope with it by polling each instance for a response. The health of the farm is continuously monitored and maintained. When the Load Average on a type of node goes above a configurable threshold a new node is inserted into the farm to spread the load and the cluster is reconfigured. When a node crashes a new machine of that type is inserted into the farm to replace it.
Databases are managed by maintaining a master database, that when put under heavy loads Scalr will bring up clones of the database as slaves. The app will read from the slaves freeing up resources on the master, which is often cpu bound, and allows you to make intensive queries without killing overall performance. Besides the intelligent and auto provisioning features of Scalr, it also offers a disaster recovery feature. If a database server or web service master is lost, Scalr can promote a slave server to the master service in order to provide a fault tolerant solution.
2. Alternatives
An alternative to Scalr is Rightscale, an enterprise solution which better suits corporate entities as it is cost inhibitive. Accounts start at $500 a month compared to $99 for Scalr. However Rightscale offers an extended range of support options in comparison to Scalr’s basic package, although Scalr offers much more support in its Mission Critical Editiion for $399 which competes with Rightscale. However in my experience, the support provided by Scalr’s basic package has been competent enough.
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Add Comment »Today I scored my first consultant job on odesk. In some ways it’s a return to the mentoring for startups I did in Liverpool a few years ago (I actually have a mentoring certificate on the office pin board), except that I will probably have to work harder and for less money. However, I’m looking forward to the challenge of advising other companies about putting their sites into the cloud.
This first job is for a company in Virginia USA who are looking to put their new high demand web app onto Amazon, with Scalr managing the scaling element. I have quite a bit of experience using both these tools with our set up at Giant Digital, so I will hopefully be able to offer some help to my first client.
I think the biggest hill I have to climb is making myself clear when explaining things, as it’s always difficult to second guess where someone else’s knowledge is, and then you don’t want to come across as patronising either. Also, I have a weakness of not being able to build arguments, as I tend to go for a scatter gun approach. So I’m helping that doing consulting work is going to help me tighten up my presentation skills. The other challenge I’m facing is to judge where the line is between professional and being too casual with people.
Anyway, I hope this to be the first of many projects that I can work on with clients who are looking to move onto AWS and Scalr.
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Add Comment »There are many tools available to entrepreneuers for free or very cheap that you should know about if you want to make your day more productive or improve your business. Here are a few tools that I use daily or have used to improve my online businesses.
Google Apps
Google have provided a whole suite of tools for business users that include group calendars, document editing and email hosting. This is a must have for any business on a budget. On setting up a domain for use with Google Apps you have a suite of online tools for your staff. The most central to this is your own company email on the Gmail platform, once you have that you can easily set up groups and mailing lists for your staff to use internally. The email server can also be used outside of the browser with Thunderbird or Outlook as well as your Blackberry or whatever. There is also a very useful group calendar available and the ability to set up a group wiki with a few clicks. While setting up your domain initially might be a little tricky for the technophobe, everything else is straight forward to use.
Amazon Web Services and Scalr.net
Not free this one, but an extremely cheap way to get dedicated hosting. If you have a busy web site and have been paying through the nose for your hosting then this could be one way of saving a lot of your monthly budget. Also known as cloud computing, hosting on Amazon’s servers will make your websites (with a little bit of work) scalable. This will mean that when your traffic grows so can your sites. If you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty with your website but you’re not a computer scientist you can pair up AWS with Scalr.net which will handle all the technical side of scaling your sites.
Open Office
Open Office is an open source productivity suite that you can install directly on your computer. If you’re not comfortable with leaving everything in Google’s hands then this could be a viable alternative to purchasing a usuable copy of Microsoft’s Office. Open Office has everything you would expect from Office with wordprocessing, spreadsheet, databases, graphics and presentation packages included in the package. You can’t really get a much better software product for free.
