David Grimmett dot com » Tech

iPhone

David — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 05:07:42 +0000

I had the pleasure of chatting with someone today, and he decided to grab my phone number, and he pulls out an iPhone. I was quite excited, because this was the first iPhone that I had seen. He showed me how it works, what it was capable of doing, and I must admit, it is quite a cool phone!! I’d love to have one, but to be completely honest, I’d probably break it way to quickly for it to be worth the money. Especially because of the touch screen. I’m notoriously hard on my phones, and I’ve cracked screens and dented them, with them usually only lasting me a year. If you are unfamiliar with the iPhone, here is a good video that shows what it is capable of.

Technical problems aren’t allowing me to embed the video, so please watch it here.

The iPhone is not available in Canada, but as always, people hack into technology and have hacked the software of the iPhone so that it will work on the Fido/Rogers network in Canada.

”

The iPhone is programmed to work only on AT&T’s wireless network in the U.S. But using methods pioneered by George Hotz, a New Jersey teenager who posted detailed instructions on how to hack an iPhone on his personal website, Mr. Tzanev unlocked the device to work on the Fido network, owned by Rogers Wireless.

The hack requires the device to be pulled apart. Software has to be rewritten and some components may need to be re-soldered. Mr. Tzanev said unlocking the iPhone is not something the average technology enthusiast should undertake.”

Story from Canada.com

Kontera Adds

David — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 03:00:39 +0000

Well, you may have noticed that today was the day that Kontera Adds was installed. I had the opportunity, as many did, I’m sure, to join Kontera Adds with the help of John Chow.

I am pretty sure that by sponsoring his fellow bloggers, John gets a cut in the earnings. But I’m not sure how big that cut is. Perhaps someone who knows could comment??

Either way, when I first saw the opportunity, I didn’t want to go for it. I wanted all the revenue from the adds for myself. But I had checked out Kontera before, and one of the requirements is that you have to have a minimum of 500,000 visitors each month. Well, I just started out, and it is going to take me a while to get there, and to be honest, the money that I start earning right away will balance out the none I would have made if I waited till my blog got that popular by itself. And even then, 500,000 visitors a month is a lot of traffic!! I don’t know how long it would take me to get there, or even if I will ever get there with a personal blog.

It will be interesting to see how much revenue this addition brings to my blog. I’ll keep you posted, as I plan on giving monthly updates.

Nintendo Wii Up For Grabs

David — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 05:25:54 +0000

The root of all evil, John Chow has done it again. He is now running a contest and is giving away a Nintendo Wii. This contest is somewhat different from the last one, which was the top commentator of the month. This one, all you have to do is write a post about him with linking to him with the the anchor text “the root of all evil.” I think with this contest, he will successfully be the top search result for the word “evil.” This contest is sponsored by 1234Pens.com. They make promotional pens. These promotional pens were the prize of the last contest, the Top Commentators of February.

Wordpress Stats Plugins

David — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 06:41:06 +0000

I am currently running two plugins for keeping track of stats. I was originally running Stat Traq which I thought was great. Although it was my first stat plugin, and I was thrilled to see how many people were actually visiting my site. Stat Traq tracks the public activity on your Wordpress blog and reports on:

* Hits
* Number of Unique PHP sessions
* Page Views
* IP Addresses (includes link to ARIN Who Is?)
* Browser
* Referrer
* Search Terms from major search engines
* Bar graphs generated for some of the reports

More recently I have installed Firestats, after seeing the plugin in action on Saman Sadeghi’s site. What initially made me want this plugin was its ability to pair Country with IP Address. It’s features are:

* Basic hit statistics (hits ever, in last 24 days etc)
* Recent popular pages
* Recent referers
* Browser and OS trees, grouped by what matters
* IP to country – know where your visitors are surfing from
* A list of recent hits
* Excluding unwanted hits from the display
- By IP address
- By user-agent (to be used to filter bots)

* Ajax UI, no need to reload the whole page – just press the ‘refresh statistics’ button to get the latest data.
* Designed to work on all browsers.

There are many overlaps in these two plugins, but there are also benefits to both of them. I like the stats that Firestats brings, like the countries and browser, especially the ability to display this in the comments by the user. And I like to see the breakdown of daily stats that Stat Traq keeps track of.

So, currently I am running both, but eventually will cut one of them. I’d love to hear your opinions on these, or any others that you use to analyze your stats on your site.