Productivity

I’m totally obsessed with my web site statistics. I know I shouldn’t be, but I am.

I’ve tried dozens of stats applications over the years, but the one I’ve settled on and have been using for some time is GetClicky.

Hey, good looking!

So, what’s so special about it? For one, it looks gorgeous. That might not seem terribly important for a stats application, but when you spend as much time with it as I do, being kind on the eye is a necessity rather than just eye candy.

When you log in, you get an overview of your account, showing the sites you have the tracking code installed on and their stats for the day:

Useful, as well as pretty

Clicking on one of the sites takes you to the dashboard for that site. This is where it starts to get fun. Sean - the man behind GetClicky - has done a tremendous job of enabling you to see most of what you’re likely to be interested in on a single page. The following two screenshots show the dashboard in all its glory.

You can show, hide and rearrange all of the panels on display. The trend figures can be configured to relate to the previous day, the same day last week, or a 7 day average. You can have bar graphs or line graphs and you can apply filters to the displayed data.

As well as the dashboard, you’ve got tabs across the top where you can drill down to show Visitor data, Actions (an action might be a download, or an exit to another site, as well as a page view), Content (to see your most popular pages), Links (to see where everyone has come from and going to), Searches (who’s using what keywords and search engines to find you) and, the icing on the cake, the tremendously useful and highly addictive Spy, where you can watch your visitors coming and going in real time. Here’s a peak at Spy in action:

Now, you could argue that I should have better things to do than sit and look in real time at who’s coming to my sites, but it does have a real benefit, which I found out yesterday. I was making some pretty major code changes to one of my sites and I suddenly noticed that I’d stopped getting any visitors via Spy. The reason? I’d put a dodgy closing tag in place. Without Spy, I might not have noticed it and almost certainly wouldn’t have noticed it as quickly as I did.

GetClicky comes in quite a few flavours, depending on how much you’d like/are prepared to pay. They have a free offering (hence it being elligible for a review here) and a number of paid accounts. The free account is useful in it’s own right, and is not totally crippled as are some others. You can track up to 3 accounts with the free version, which is pretty reasonable. You’ll have to part with some cash if you want Spy, filtering and a few other features and if you want to track more than 3 sites. There’s a complete list of what you get at the various subscription levels here.

Conclusion

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I use Google Analytics once a week or so, as it’s great for seeing trends over a long period of time, but GetClicky is my Stats package of choice for day-to-day use. It’s always open on a tab somewhere in Firefox. The provided features are genuinely useful, as well as fun. Who’d have ever thought you could have fun with stats?!

As they provide a free package to get you started, you’ve no excuse for not giving it a try. So, get over there now and sign up!

[Homepage and Download]

I move from computer to computer a great deal. More often than not, the computer I’m at doesn’t always have all the software I might need. It’s not always possible to just go and install anything I fancy on any machine I happen to use and this is where Portable Apps comes to the rescue.

Portable Apps Suite is effectively a wrapper for a number of very useful applications that can be installed on a USB pen drive (or any USB storage device, for that matter). To fire it up, simply double-click the “StartPortableApps.exe” on your USB device and you’re greeted with a nice little menu, similar to the Windows Start Menu, as can be seen on the screenshot below.

There are currently three versions of the Portable Apps Suite available for download. They only really differ in the amount of pre-installed applications they contain. Here are the various configurations:

• PortableApps Suite (Standard Edition): ClamWin Portable (antivirus), Mozilla Firefox - Portable Edition (web browser), Gaim Portable (instant messaging), OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite), Sudoku Portable (puzzle game), Mozilla Sunbird - Portable Edition (calendar/task manager) and Mozilla Thunderbird - Portable Edition (email client) and runs comfortably from a 512MB drive.
• PortableApps Suite (Lite Edition): Uses AbiWord Portable (word processor) instead of OpenOffice.org Portable and runs comfortably from a 256MB drive.
• PortableApps Suite (Base Edition): If you’d like to pick and choose exactly which apps to include, you can try Portable Apps Suite (Base Edition). This is a stripped down package with just the PortableApps Menu, PortableApps Backup utility and custom folders, icons and autorun. It’s less than 1MB installed, so it’s a great option for smaller drives.

My base download was the Standard Edition, to which I’ve added FileZilla, Nvu Portable, KeyPass and one or two others.

The usefulness of this application cannot be stressed enough. I don’t find many things more frustrating than when I need to go and change something on a computer I don’t normally have access to, only to find that my preferred software is not available. Now it’s simply a matter of popping in my pen drive and selecting the desired application. Nothing could be simpler.

To download any new applications, you simply download the executable, then select “Install a new app” from the Suite’s menu and select the new application. To “uninstall” an application, you only need delete the directory from your pen drive. If only all application installation/uninstallations were this simple.

[Homepage and Download]

Here’s an application that covers all my requirements for a slick piece of software - simple to use and efficient. Texter, from LifeHacker, is, at heart, a macro recorder. I’ve tried many in the past, but most of them seemed to require more work than the work it was meant to simplify!

The idea is very simple - define some text you frequently type, for example your email signature. Give that text a shortcut, such as #sig and a “Trigger”, such as the space key. Then, when you need to enter that text, simply type #sig, hit the space bar and there’s your text. You can enter Script as well as plain text. So, let’s expand on the email signature example. The screenshot below shows the script for the signature I use when emailing about my Flight Simulator site (which you can find here, in case you’re tempted to look!):

So now, when I press #fsig and the space bar, I get the following on screen:

Cheers,

Mark

—
FlightSimX - http://www.flightsimx.co.uk
Join the Flight Simulator Network - http://.flightsimulator.ning.com

Now, how many key presses a year is that going to save me?

You can write scripts for just about anything you can use the keyboard for. This program really is a godsend. I do a lot of coding in my day-to-day work, and this is great for code-snippets etc.

Texter also supports clipboard support. Simply place %c anywhere in the script and it’ll be replaced with whatever’s in your clipboard at the time you execute it. You can also insert %| in the script and the cursor will be positioned to that point once executed.

Texter sits unobtrusively in the Windows Task Bar and can insert text into any Windows application. If you find yourself constantly entering the same text, you owe it to yourself and your keyboard to give this application a try.

[Homepage and download]

I’ve been on the lookout for the “perfect” note taking application for years, and nothing previously tested really did what I wanted, i.e. basically a free-form note taker with cross-referencing, that was very easy to use. ZuluPad comes very close. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s near perfect for my needs.

ZuluPad is a very young application (version tested here is 0.3.6), but is already showing signs of maturity. I’m testing the Windows version here, but it’s also available for OSX.

Think of ZuluPad as cross between a notepad-type application and a Wiki. It’s described by the author as “ZuluPad is a notepad on crack”

When you start the application, you’re presented with a single “Index” page, with some navigation icons across the top, a menu bar and a large text area. You can just start typing in the text area to enter your notes.

The fun part starts when you want to start cross-referencing data. With the text you’ve just entered, highlight a word or phrase, click the Link button (or press Control-L) and you’ll be presented with a new page, with a title of the word or phrase previously selected. You can now see a list of these pages in a drop-down list at the top of the page allowing you to easily navigate through them. Each time you enter a word you have previously created a link for, it is automatically linked to the created page for you.

It really is very easy, very intuitive and, most importantly, very useful. I love the fact that you can just enter whatever you want, and it automatically references your other notes for you.

Installation is a breeze. Just extract the downloaded files wherever you want. I have it installed on my USB pen drive so I can take it anywhere with me.

Another great feature is ZuluSync. The idea is that you sign up for a free account on their web site, then enter those log-in details into ZuluPad. Once done, you select ZuluSync Send from the menu, and your entire document is stored on the ZuluPad server. When you get home, you can select ZuluSync receive and it’ll download the document to your local copy of ZuluPad. You can also view your “sent” documents via the ZuluPad web site. Terrific idea.

This application shows an awful lot of promise. I’ll certainly be keeping a close eye on developments.

[Homepage and Download]

Mind Maps - I know they’re not for everyone, but I love them. I have better success brainstorming using this method than any other. I find the whole concept fits superbly with the way my mind works (not sure what that says about my brain!).

I’ve tried virtually all the mind mapping software I can get hold of. Most of it is prohibitively expensive for individuals (IMHO) and most of them are of the Microsoft Word variety, i.e. you’ll never use 90% of the functionality.

FreeMind works superbly in that it offers all of the basic requirements for constructing a mind map, but you’re not bogged down with functions you don’t need. It’s fast and stable and allows me to get what’s in my head onto the screen in the quickest time possible.

You can link to external files and other mind maps from any nodes, expand/collapse any/all nodes at will, drag the map around the screen, zoom in/out at will, add notes to nodes and generally do all the things you really need in order to create useful maps in a very short time.

The user manual is supplied in mind map format, giving you the chance to have a good play with it without first having to create your own map.

You can export your maps in various formats, including html, JPEG etc, for inclusion your web site or other documents.

If you like mind maps and haven’t tried this, give it a go. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. If you’ve never heard of mind maps, also give it a try. It certainly changed the way I carry out any kind of project development for the better.

 
FreeMind main screen

 
MindMap with all elements collapsed