For the last few days I have been playing with a new productivity tool that excites me almost as much as Wildfire used to. Sandy is a sort of PA who you can talk to via email and Twitter in almost-human language. She takes notes, makes appointments, builds to-do lists and keeps track of your diary. She sends a note every day (irritatingly formatted in Comic Sans) and special reminders for individual things if you ask her to. Because you can talk to her by twitter, you can send her a message whenever you need to by text. The thing looks like it works quite well. You can even use it to work with other people. It’s not finished, and the developer team are still adding features. I think what I like best is the idea of having Samantha from Bewitched helping me remember what I’m supposed to be doing.
Category Archives: Tech
Last year’s site stats
I have over a full year of Google Analytics data for this site now, and I have spent an hour today pulling through the data.
The key thing I get out of it is the disparity between what I think this site is for, and what the data shows other people use it for.
Anecdotally, people at work who read this often stop me in corridors and talk to me about it. A lot of people love it – use the quizzes, follow the links, look at the photos. Some other councillors like the recipes. Some councillors however just can’t see the point. They think it’s weird and don’t understand why people bother to read it.
Now I have a lot of data to pore over to see what’s going on. I got an average of 80 hits a day, with a huge peak on 5th March.
66% of them got here after using a search engine, predominantly (in fact 89%) Google. The average reader spent less than a minute here, suggesting they typed something in to google, came here, and either found what they were looking for or didn’t, and went off again.
Top ten search queries that found me were:
- pear crumble (recipe link here)
- alex foster
- hip delay
- dead like me music (answer here)
- gay rubber (eh??!)
- kpmg anthem
- tenbury wells floods
- niles blog
- we all know frogs go
22% of readers came here because they’d followed a link on someone else’s site. These readers spent more time here – more like over a minute each.
The top ten referrers were…
- libdemblogs.co.uk
- librivox.org
- iaindale.blogspot.com
- libdemvoice.org
- liberalengland.blogspot.com
- niles.org.uk
- bloglines.com
- leigh’s blog
- navitron (solar panel suppliers – I posted on their forum)
- catstripe.co.uk
Finally, 11% came here because they wanted to. Called “Direct Traffic” in Analytics, these are the people who are here because they typed the URL into their browsers directly. You must be my real readers, so thank you very much!
Of course, it’s slightly more complicated than that. The people who came here through links in Bloglines are the people who’ve decided they want to follow the info here. The people who put “alex foster” and “niles’s blog” into Google also wanted to come here, but couldn’t remember what the website was. And the people who went to http://www.niles.org.uk – really need to update their bookmarks!
The referrers are interesting. Some are understandable: libdemblogs is designed to send more traffic to people like me. Iain Dale is interesting – I’m listed as one of many in his links, but in the last year, as far as I can see, he hasn’t actually written about me at all. The year before, he was bigging me up enormously, and my traffic reflected that, but it’s interesting he can send substantial traffic my way without even talking about me!
“Facebook” in the google search terms is similarly weird. At one point in the year I blogged that I had joined facebook. For several months after that, I was top of the list if you googled facebook. I was ahead of the actual facebook website. Bizarre.
At the end of the day, however, you just have to hand it to the 957 people last year who wanted to make pear crumble. I really recommend the recipe!
Solar panel performance 07
Rather impressed to hear the solar panel working today, New Year’s Eve, on a grey, overcast day with no hint of sun. It ran for less than an hour so if I hadn’t heard it, it wouldn’t have been recorded in the stats.
Since it started working in September, its mini-computer calculates that it has generated 385kW of heat for the hot water tank.
Using Nottingham Energy Partnership‘s energy ready reckoner, that’s about £10.72 worth of gas. We will have to see how well it performs when confronted with an actual summer.
This week’s project
Distracting myself a little from frantic general election planning, I’ve been installing a wee weather station at the bottom of the garden.
It’s the cheapest available (as far as I can tell!) that measures lots of different things, and communicates with a PC for logging the data. It’s a Lacrosse WS-2300.
The site I chose for the sensors was the best available, but there are a number of flaws. Firstly there is nowhere anywhere near our house that’s suitable for a wind meter. We’re surrounded by trees, and there’s a huge hill on one side. Even sticking it on the roof wouldn’t do, as the tree in front of our house is taller than the highest point on the house. And the roof would also not be all that convenient for access when it comes to replacing batteries. So wherever it goes, it won’t be terribly accurate as the shadowing from buildings, trees or hills will funnel the weather and shelter it from the lower breezes.
The other issue I thought about when installing was that the fence post I’m using is a little too close to the compost bin, which is rotting away merrily and producing quite a lot of heat.
It’s become clearer from today’s temperature readings, which are about 10 degrees too high, compared to other nearby people’s observations, the forecast, and my other outdoor thermometers, that the thermometer is in full sun. I will either have to move it, or make a Stevenson screen.
The software it came with has fairly serious limitations, so for the last day or so I have been using Weather Display on a free trial, which has been uploading to a webpage. Weather Display has thousands of features, most of which have very limited application. The screens are a complete eyesore, and the website it generates is an affront to the eyes, and web standards (huge images covered in text, for starters.) See for yourself.
I’ve been experimenting with a Mac application called Weather Tracker, which says it should work with the weather station I have but that isn’t quite right…
Have been happily uploading data to Weather Underground, too.
Solar panel update
After a few false starts and complications (nothing is ever simple with this house…) the panel has now been running for a few days.
Nothing is quite perfect – the panel is in shade in the afternoon because of a tree, and doesn’t get the earliest sun anyway. The last few days have been very mixed in terms of weather. The end of September is clearly not the best time to get sun.
And yet every day so far, the panel has got solar gain. Not much, admittedly: four and five degrees a day – but that’s still taking a bit of gas out of the equation. Hopefully we’ll get more in strong sun.
Before I went away from the weekend, I toggled something in the controller that now makes it display how many watts of heat it’s gaining, and keep a running total. During Saturday and Sunday, it thinks it got 19kWh of heat out of the sun. I think that’s roughly equivalent to 80p worth of gas.
I paid extra to have a top range controller I can use across my computer network. So I can have a program on my computer that tells me what the panel is doing – here’s it’s current readout:
On the right-hand side S1 (sensor 1) is the temperature at the panel (which is actually double the current air temperature outside). S2 is – as the diagram shows – at the bottom of the tank; S3 at the top. It’s at 62deg at the moment because after sunset, the gas comes on to get it to the right temp for showering in the morning. On the left side, the black spot represents a green LED that comes on when the pump is turning, and the pump triangle in the diagram also turns.
It does all this both on the program on my PC and on the digital read-out of the controller. If you’re the sort of person who checks what the temperature is several times a day, or who taps a barometer when passing, a little readout like this is grist to the mill. I find myself making detours to the airing cupboard to see how hot my water is now.
The reason it needs these temperature readings is that the controller turns the pump on whenever there’s an appreciable difference between the temperature at the panel and the temperature at the hot water tank.
Although the controller is pretty cool, there doesn’t seem to be a way of getting at the data without the fancy graphics. I was hoping there was going to be a platform independent doodad that just let me read the temperatures and keep a record, and make calculations separately. In my mind, I had Automator on the Mac keeping records at quarterly intervals, and creating a web page to say how much solar gain I was getting at any given point. Maybe it could even be linked in to Skype so that my solar panel could send a text message when it turns on…
Hi-tech woes
I am treating myself to a dead swanky hotel this year in Brighton, not anything I think I shall be able to afford again any time soon.
One of the reasons was to make sure I had proper internet access from my room, cutting out the necessity to haul my laptop into the conference centre, through endless security bag checks, to use the free wireless connection in the bar.
Unfortunately, this afternoon when I sat down to use it I found things weren’t quite so straightforward. An hour later, it transpires that the room was recarpeted immediately before it was my room, and the hotel’s technical guy suspects the carpeters have nailed through the wire connecting the laptop cable.
Ho hum, it works now, thanks to some sort of weird cludge plugging the laptop into the back of the telly, and moving the desk around a bit. That does mean that now if I lift my eyes from the screen just a little bit, I have the gorgeous view over the sea instead. Which might not be all that conducive to doing the work I have to get through whilst I’m down here to supplement conference.
Now, all I need is some batteries for my voice recorder, and I might be ready to make some podcasts. But my keen colleagues on Lib Dem Voice have gone one better this year and have been making video vox pops – all available at www.libdemvoice.org. Editing videos and adding titles is something I must add to my skill set – the last time I did that sort of thing it was on a broadcast-quality CCTV rig at the Three Choirs. So, I know how to do vision mixing live and with no sound, but have no idea how to use a computer to edit VT with sound.
The Wii Games that didn’t make it
Cii-Section. Eep!
Edit: Or maybe they did get made…
Nottingham on TV
Nottingham’s been on the telly a lot recently – or at least it’s been on ours! Two fictional characters in two days have said they’re from Nottingham.
First John Smith, the human that Dr Who turns into in the most recent episode, said he was from “a house in Broadmarsh,” but for plot reasons couldn’t remember a great deal about it.
Then last night, we watched V for Vendetta – a bleak vision of a totalitarian future for a Britain kept on its knees in fear of terrorism, where the government bans free protest, locks up and tortures its own citizens, routinely spies on them, and prevents them from criticising the authorities. In it, there was a lesbian character who found herself removed from her flat, locked away in a prison, has her hair shaved off, and is eventually murdered. She was from a “a farm in Nottingham, Tottlebrook,” which made us both double-take a little.
Incidentally, I’ve started using Flixster on Facebook to record movies seen, ratings and reviews. It seems really good – and will be even better when they sort out their engine properly to merge “Flixster-on-Facebook” with their main website http://www.flixster.com so that we can have the full functionality without having to be on Facebook.
Chesterfield’s campaigners and councillors
We have a weekly briefing meeting in Chesterfield for campaigners and councillors, every Sunday at 9pm. It’s going on right now. They’ve all be trooping through, clutching completed canvass cards and the latest bits of opposition literature in their hands.
They’ve all very tanned. Which is a good sign. It means that they’re spending every daylight hour pounding pavements.
ForecastFox says they’re not going to have such a nice week of it next week!
Regrets
Today, after resisting for years, I turned on One-Click on Amazon.
I’ve a feeling I will come to regret that.
Niles's Blog 