Yep, now you know.. you’re not the only one with problems.. spiders have them too. And I mean Web Spiders.
Say you are called Slurp, Googlebot or something Microsoftish.. you vist websites all the time.. and some websites don’t like that.. like imdb.com 
(The above image says: “Request Limit Reached: There have been an unusually high number of pages requested by you”).
Old question I hear you think 
But still it will get asked when you start Ruby on Rails projects for clients. One way of comforting a client is just naming a few RoR success stories: “Twitter uses Rails, it has about 8.000.000 unique visitors a month.”.
Evan Weaver has a nice comparison of some big Rails sites on his blog. Together with some nice graphics. It shows Rails can scale.. and it also shows that’s not the only question. See his blog for more nice graphs.
So you see.. there are quite some site that have pretty much requests (vertical bar = # of requests). For example: twitter.com, yellowpages.com, etc..
Internet Explorer has some influence on webdesign.. all webdesigners know it. You’ve designed a complete site that works in Firefox, Opera and Safari… but sadly not the one that is mostly used; IE.
So.. what do you do? You start fixing.. and how do you call your CSS classes that fix everything?
(This is the HTML source of a top1000 alexa website :))
SlideShare is really cool. You can easily search for presentation on a subject and just mashup the contents of a few presentations into a new one. Which is great Previously we already had flickr to get some slide images from.. but now we have a complete storyline.
However.. some presentations can’t be used.. because they are too good. Check this one for example.. kudos to the maker
Last Tuesday Jeroen Hulscher and I did a presentation about Mashups at the Hogeschool Utrecht.. see for yourself below:
So.. I saw the homepage of Tijs Teulings and got inspired with his ‘my current location’ thingy. As you can see on the map, it uses an Iphone (I guess).
Now..this is the way to create something like that:
Now the only thing you have to do is grab the coordinates out of this XML-feed and put them in a map. I’ve supplied some Ruby code to do this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 | # Navizon::Tracker wrapper in Ruby by Joost Hietbrink (joost@joopp.com) # See: http://blog.joopp.com/2008/05/21/track-yourself-and-your-stolen-iphone/ module Navizon class Tracker attr_accessor :url, :user, :resul # Usage: # tracker = Navizon::Tracker.new('1F51235E5F58') def initialize(user) @user = user @url = "http://my.navizon.com/Webapps/UserAdmin/UserService.asmx/GetUserLocation?user=#{user}" end def track! xml_data = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(@url)).body @result = XmlSimple.xml_in(xml_data, { 'ForceArray' => false }) end require 'xmlsimple' # Returns location as array [lat, lng] def location @result ||= self.track! location = @result['UserInfo']['Location'] [location['Latitude'].to_f, location['Longitude'].to_f] end # Returns Ruby time of result def timestamp @result ||= self.track! Time.parse(@result['UserInfo']['Location']['Timestamp']) end end end |
When on Rails, put this in lib/navizon.rb. And install the xml-simple gem.
Now to put it on your site just use the Google Maps API, or Yahoo or Microsoft or just all of them (mapstraction). Get the location by using the following in your controller action:
1 2 | # Returns a [lat, lng] array @location = Navizon::Tracker.new('1D52195EFFFF').location |
Of course you should replace the ‘1d52…FFFF’ part with the part in the XML URL you still have on your clipboard (right ;))
Have fun!
Having an Iphone I often use the superb Google Maps. And, I believe as of version 1.1.3 of the Iphone firmware, you can press the ‘My location’ button and you find where you are. No GPS. Only cell tower data. And.. it is scaringly accurate.
Now you (at least I) figure.. how do they do it? And..surprise surprise.. you can find out here:
http://maps.alphadex.de/index.php?section=mylocation
I came by it here:
http://mrblog.org/2008/03/05/google-cell-tower-location-api-reverse-engineered/
As it says it that blog article apparently Google doesn’t want the world to now.. but it works stunning.
We’ve added ourselves to the coworking map created by Alper and Robert. So when you are a Web2.0-savvy-geek on the move.. come to grab a coffee, some wifi and conversation. Join us at the Patrijsweg 74 in Rijswijk at the TamTam innovation lab. Contact us (Joost @ +31 6 14896541/joost@joopp.com) to see if we’re in.
Google Analytics is a great tool to measure your websites traffic. However.. it measures a LOT. What should you look at? Here is a great video on your site’s bouncerate. According to the video about 40-60% of your website’s visitors are instantly leaving. So you might have great benefits while improving this.
We at Joopp have much experience in optimizing websites for search engines (SEO) but also in optimizing websites for humans. So.. when your website is found (which is the first step) your visitors should actually USE the site. This is even more important when you are spending money on your visitors (eg. by buying ads (adwords)). High bounce rates on landing pages of ads are killing.
Here are some tips on improving your site: human optimization (HO ):
The Joopp team was attending at the leefjedroom kickoff event of TamTam.. which gives nice pictures..
(Update: We removed the direct image links since Flickr won’t serve the images)
For more pictures check Flickr.
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