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Google Analytics Master Class is back in Singapore!
Last year, I attended the first ever Google Analytics Master Class held here in Singapore. I had a great time. It was a half day packed with excellent presentations for both existing GA users and new people looking to adopt GA.
Well, come March 9, 2010, its back in Singapore! Not only that, folks in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia will also get their own Google Analytics Master Class on March 11, 2010
In: News · Tagged with: google analytics
Codeigniter: Handling errors
As coders, I’m sure we all know the value of good error handling. So I thought a quick post about how Codeigniter deals with those pesky errors would be a good post.
The way I see it, there are 2 types of errors we have to work with. The ones which are displayed out in nice friendly text to your users, and the type which are hidden and shown only to you as the coder to figure out where something has gone wrong. CI provides the means to do both, thankfully.
In: PHP Tutorials · Tagged with: codeigniter, errors
Pentaho: A beginner’s perspective
For the last 6 months, I’ve been buried deep in the world of Business Intelligence (or BI for short) and the mind-numbing field that is Data Warehousing and Data Mining. Given that I’m not really a database person, and I only use MySQL with my PHP development, this was a whole new experience for me.
I’m writing this post because when I first laid my eyes on Pentaho, I was confused as hell. What I didn’t know was that Pentaho is not a single product, but a collection of open-source tools that have been meshed together to form a suite for BI. All the documentation and writeup at the website on the different aspects of Pentaho just didn’t gel together, leading to a very steep learning curve.
Hence, I’m just going to briefly cover the various aspects that makes up Pentaho, so that if you are just starting to use Pentaho, this would hopefully give you a good overview.
In: Pentaho · Tagged with: business intelligence, data warehouse, Pentaho
Site Update: 2 years old!
Come December 4th, this site will be 2 years old! How time flies. To mark this occasion, I’ve revamped the look of the site, and will continue to tweak various things in the days ahead.
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In: News · Tagged with: site update
Codeigniter: Intergrating OpenFlashCharts
Yes I know, it has been some time since I last posted anything on the site. Things have just been crazy at work, trying to get up to speed on using Pentaho for a major project. In fact, I might start posting some Pentaho related topics in the future. There’s definitely a need for more help and guides on using Pentaho for beginners.
Anyway, one of the things on the project was to pull data from Pentaho and display it inside OpenFlashCharts on a CI platform. If you don’t know what OpenFlashCharts is, go visit the website. It’s a pretty awesome kit.
There’s been quite a bit of chatter on the net about integrating CI with OpenFlashCharts, but ever since version 2 came out there have been more questions about how to do it.
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In: PHP Tutorials · Tagged with: codeigniter, openflashcharts
Codeigniter: Setting up multiple sites on one install
It’s been awhile since I last posted about Codeigniter. In this post, I’m going to walkthrough how I setup a CI install that can support multiple sites. This is by no means the only way to do it, but it’s what works for me.
CI’s default folder structure is really geared towards one site domain, and having both the application folder and the system folder visible to the browser is not exactly a secure approach.
By configuring your install to support multiple sites, not only do you make the updating of the CI core easier, but also make the CI install more secure as a whole. So without delay, let’s get started…
In: PHP Tutorials · Tagged with: Apache, codeigniter, website
WebPageTest: The little known but great webpage benchmarking tool.
When it comes to testing how fast a webpage loads, many of us are familiar with Firebug/Yslow tool (installable as a Firefox browser plug-in). Firebug/Yslow is a fantastic plug-in for Firefox, it gives a wealth of information about any webpage as your browser renders it. This is a must have for any webmaster’s toolbox. Unfortunately, using Firebug/Yslow is very ad-hoc, which is great for troubleshooting, but tedious when you want to export data or take more than 1 snapshot.
After some searching I came across another tool – webpagetest.org. This site tests your url and presents its findings and recommendations on optimizating your webpage, with some nice Firebug/Yslow-like waterfall diagram and charts. Check out the results for this site as tested from Dulles, Virginia in the US. Good stuff right?
In: Website Building/SEO · Tagged with: performance, webpagetest, website
PHP Basics: Accessing Remote URLs using cURL
In this post, I’m going back to basics to talk about accessing remote URLs with cURL.
In PHP, there are actually four ways to access a remote URL – fopen() fsockopen(), cURL extensions and HTTP_Request class from the PEAR library. Now, choosing one way over another really depends on your needs for simplicity, control, and portability.
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In: PHP Tutorials · Tagged with: curl, PHP, tutorial
Google Analytics API class for PHP
About a month back, Google opened the Google Analytics API service to all Analytics users. the API allows developers to integrate the GA reports into their own applications or websites, or even access the reports from a phone!
I’ve been thinking about how I can make use of this API to enhance the sites I’m working on. But before kicking off ideas, I had to find out how to access and use the API. I finally came up with a PHP class that will do all the grunt work of calling the API, you just need to supply your report’s parameter and the PHP class will return you an array of Analytics data.
In: PHP Tutorials · Tagged with: api, google analytics, php class
Google ‘Wonder Wheel’ and new search features
Google has launched a new set of features to their search engine which they call “Search Options”. It bring a collection of tools that lets us slice-and-dice our search results to find what we want faster.
The new features includes the ability to filter a search by types such as Forums, Videos, Reviews, etc. We can also filter the results by time, show more description text, and even show thumbnail images from the page. But the best feature has to be the Wonder Wheel – a diagrammatic way to represent related keywords.
In: Website Building/SEO · Tagged with: google, search