Dan Grossman

OpenCalais Class and WordPress Plugin Updated

Dan — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 16:53:16 +0000

My OpenCalais PHP class and WP Calais Auto Tagger WordPress plugin have been updated. The class now supports the latest API endpoint, all entity types and social tags. The WordPress plugin was completely rewritten to use that new class and to use jQuery for all its DOM manipulation.

DialShield

Dan — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 05:37:12 +0000

DialShield lets you add automatic, real-time phone verification to your website. By adding a pre-built widget or integrating with its simple API, you can call or text customers during signup or checkout with a unique code they then enter into the website. This ties anonymous users to a unique, traceable offline artifact, preventing bulk registrations and drastically reducing payment fraud.

DialShield is a product I took from idea to conception:

Integrated with VOIP services to provide voice and SMS integration from the web
Designed and coded the public-facing website and web application
Integrated with live websites for testing and documented usage and APIs

w3roi Plans Upgraded

Dan — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 18:42:37 +0000

Every 2-3 years I re-evaluate Awio’s infrastructure and usually end up making significant changes. This year, that resulted in moving every site and service I run to new hardware, taking advantage of lower costs for multi-core processors and RAM than in past years.

w3roi, the service I created to measure and optimize the performance of online advertising, has always been priced by the number of ad clicks each user needs to track each month. This ties pricing to the hardware costs involved in running the site, as tracking and analyzing more clicks requires more CPU, RAM and bandwidth.

Since costs have dropped, all of w3roi’s plans have been upgraded to offer more resources at the same price. Depending on the plan, the increase includes up to 4 times as many tracked clicks as before. Existing customers’ plans have been upgraded with these new limits effective immediately.

New House, New Dashboard Display

Dan — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:34:11 +0000

After living in 7 apartments in 7 years, I’ve given up renting and bought my first home.

One benefit of all the extra space is room for a permanent dashboard display. I combined an old 22″ widescreen monitor with a Logitech Revue (Google TV) box Google sent out free to developers last year to display a GeckoBoard custom dashboard. The widgets are driven by XML feeds from my own servers showing the current day’s sales and registration stats.

With my new favorite gadget, a Belkin Conserve Insight, I measured power usage of the whole setup as no higher than 50 watts max. That means I can leave the display on all day while using less power than a single 60W light bulb, and always know how the day’s sales are going at a glance.

The Real-Time Pulse Dashboard

Dan — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 23:07:20 +0000

Earlier this week W3Counter went live with a new website and new features for PRO users. The website was in need of its first major redesign in several years, widening the layout and refreshing the feature tour to cover all the current reports available to both free and paying users.

One of the most interesting new features for PRO users is the Real-Time Pulse Dashboard. This is a new, live-updating report that shows current visitor activity across a website. Not only does it reveal the usual stats like where each visitor came from, what browser and operating system they’re using, and where they are located, but it also shows what they’re doing. The dashboard is powered by a node.js server which each visitor pings every 20 seconds with their current activity — reading, writing, or if they just left the webpage open in a hidden tab.

node-searchparser

Dan — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 03:24:35 +0000

A node.js module for searching HTTP referrer strings for search engine names and search keywords.

More free code: node-searchparser

Dan — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 03:22:52 +0000

node-searchparser is a little node.js module for parsing HTTP referrer URLs for search engine names and search keywords. It’s just one of a few modules I had to write while putting together a node.js server for a new real-time dashboard I’m adding to W3Counter in the near future.

Book and Magazine Mentions

Dan — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 10:25:25 +0000

My websites w3roi and W3Counter were recently mentioned in a book and a magazine. w3roi’s design appears in the recently published Web Designer’s Idea Book (Volume 2).

W3Counter was the topic of the “Expert Tip of the Month” column in .net magazine issue 206.

node-browscap

Dan — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 07:04:14 +0000

A port of PHP’s get_browser function to a native node.js module, including a JavaScript browscap.ini parser.

A browscap.ini parser in JavaScript

Dan — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 07:03:43 +0000

I use PHP’s get_browser function to identify web browsers from user agent strings on several sites. I wanted this ability in a node.js application I’m writing, so I wrote a JavaScript implementation to use.

You can get it here: http://github.com/dangrossman/node-browscap

It includes a parser for browscap.ini files from the Browser Capabilities Project site, converting the patterns from that file to regular expressions JavaScript can compile and match user agents against. The matched browser’s properties are returned as an associative array.