So this week has been a HARD CORE CRUNCH WEEK. Not only did I have a decent allotment of work to complete at WebTrends but I also had relatives visit, another project that I'm trying to finish up kick in, and in addition to all that a April 2nd deadline that I had to knock out this week for a side site I'm working on. Needless to say this week blossomed into a wonderfully huge crazy super long hour daily non-stop coding party. Every day has consisted of code, design, cube questions, database implementation, session training preparation, WebTrends meetings, meetings with friends, a beer for a break, a quick awesome meal here, another there, and then a few hours of sleep. Non-stop is really kind of a weak way to say what this week has been, because really, the remote idea that a stop was even possible is wrong.
So to summarize, for my readers and myself. Here's what I've knocked out this week and a few things from last week for good measure.
Unfuddled Account
I could NOT have completed this last week without having setup an Unfuddled Account to manage all the projects that I have going on. Many of them would have just languished and no progress would have been made. Instead I've moved forward on ALL fronts. Absolute awesome what some task management software can help a person do.
Unfuddled offers some amazing project software to assist with tasks, messaging, and all that. The back end of course is managed via a rocking Subversion Source Repository. If anybody has projects, side projects, or anything that has "steps" toward the end goal, Unfuddled is an awesome option!
I've picked up and started working on a kind of "standard" for inserting and utilizing Page Flakes (ala www.pageflakes.com) within other sites I'm building. The concept of drag-able, self managed, widgets to contain everything from address books to zoo listings is awesome. I can definitely see it being integrated into more and more web sites in the future.
In addition to that I picked up the O'Reilly Book from one of the main developers on Page Flakes called Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5. Very awesome book if you're interested in portals and especially if you're interested in Page Flakes or page widgets.
BLOG Failure
Lately I've been a failure at attempting to keep the ole' blog updated. What has really ruffled my feathers and I hope to do something about in a few months, is get started porting or creating my own custom blog engine and social site code base. I have some done, but I'm absolutely zero steps closer to getting this site transferred into that new application base. If I had to write an error message related to my lack of blogging it would look like the "Best Software error message EVER".
WebTrends, Analytics, Business Intelligence, and more Analytics
Another thing that I've got the ball rolling on finally is to start a high end WebTrends Account (which is NOT your grandpa's analytics account). With this I'm going to start building out tons of capabilities into some libraries for auto-tagging of sites for web site analytics. This should be an interesting effort as it touches on personal hobby in addition to work related activities. It will be nice to bridge that gap. It will also be nice to go far beyond what I am able to derive from Google Analytics and the open source AWStats Analytics I have installed on the server I have this blog and associated sites hosted on.
I've finally got it scoped out what I can present and show of WebTrends Software and what I can or can't talk about without getting canned or cause damage to the company – so basically – I'm going to display, show, and write about everything that I would even if I didn't have any limits. So stay tuned my analytics readers, there will be some good material posted soon. Especially if you're developing customized or highly proprietary implementations utilizing WebTrends for Analytics, Visitor Intelligence (Cubes!), or other functions.
I keep saying Pageflakes in place of DropThings. The thing is, the guy who wrote the book and built out DropThings basically built it in regards to Pageflakes. Having been that he was/is a developer on the Pageflakes project. I think he might even have been "the" developer on the Pageflakes Project.
But anyway, I am using it because it provides an awesome organizational ability for sites. I would think others (myspace, facebook) etc would be utilizing more of this technology already but they aren’t. My site that I’ll be building out however, will definitely use the information and data capabilities of Pageflakes/DropThings organization.
🙂