Archive for December, 2009

Google released a lot of goodies the last few weeks. There is the birth of Chrome OS, then we saw the launch of real-time results, and now there is Google Goggles which will probably work great on the Google Phone, to be released next year. Between all this Google also released something called Living Stories, and meanwhile almost everyone now has received a Google Wave invite.

It does make you wonder a bit where all this is going…

Still, it *is* cool technology for the mobile web (which is the future). It’s exclusively available for Android, so I whopped out my HTC Hero to search for it on the market. However, I forget to read the fine print: Google Googles is only available for Android 1.6+ and my 4 months old Hero is still stuk on 1.4. HTC should have an update to 2.0 (or even 2.1) ready anytime now, if the rumours are true (skipping 1.6 all together)

In the meanwhile, you can also take a look at this short video to get an idea.

Google Goggles reminds me of Layar – but after looking a bit closer, it is a bit different. In addition to GPS and compass information, Goggles also has visual recognition software to detect your surroundings or object. It still in its infancy but looks very promising. Is it just a matter of time before Google buyes Layar to add the augmented reality (OpenGL) 3D environment to Goggles?

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There are various analytic tools available to gain insight in your sites’ statistics. These are mostly tools like Clicky, Google Analytics or Crazy Egg and only give you information about your visitors.

There are often times when you need to know what is happening within your content management system itself. Especially if you are running a dynamic community website with lots of user activity. How is my content devided and which content-types are popular? How many users do I have which never log in? And a lot of other questions.

Most of the time, these are internal Drupal statistics, and while you can get some of these things to work with third party services (like role segregation in Google Analytics), not everything can be accessed by these tools.

For Drupal, there is an alternative called the Report module. Still an alpha at this point, but it delivers some great info in addition to the core statistics module. The beauty of this module is the way it works together with the Chart API module to generate nice charts and diagrams. Like in the example above.

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