A few months ago, a project bid had me looking at YouTube’s JavaScript API for ways to manage a video library through a custom interface. Most of the videos were over 30 minutes, and I thought it would be great if I could provide some analytics on how users were interacting with the videos. Were people getting bored and leaving at a certain spot, rewinding interesting parts, or maybe randomly scrubbing through it?
Archive for the ‘Utilities’ Category
Clicky Monitor, AKA ClickyChrome
Sunday, March 14th, 2010
A Chrome Extension for Clicky Web Analytics
Clicky is an amazing web analytics service. Its killer feature is the ability see data in real-time, allowing you to watch your visitors as they browse your site.
I love Clicky, and I love their API. Because the analytics data is available immediately, I found myself wishing I could have a constant notification of how many visitors were on my site without having to leave a tab or window open all the time.
I also love Google Chrome. As soon as LastPass made an extension for it, Chrome became my default browser. After reading a little about Chrome extensions and how they were just HTML and JavaScript, I knew what my next project would be… ClickyChrome.
Update: A year after releasing ClickyChrome, I’m changing the name to Clicky Monitor to comply with Google’s new branding guidelines.
Picasa XML Generator
Friday, September 11th, 2009
Two years ago I found myself writing a photo gallery application for a custom CMS that allowed you to upload, crop, caption, group and sort your photos for the site’s online galleries. I remember thinking to myself what a chore it was to be reinventing the wheel—there are already excellent free services available that provide this functionality. I wanted the ability to have my client use Picasa to manage his galleries, and view them via SlideShowPro (SSP) on his site. At that time however, support for Picasa’s RSS feeds was not available in SSP.
