Twitter alerts: using twitter streaming API for fun and profit

23 Oct
2009

twitter_alerts

Twitter is a wonderful service, but, until now, you have to subscribe to some websites to be alerted when a selected word (maybe your trademark) is tweeted. We’ll try to develop a service that filters the tweeter api, stores the interesting ones in our database, and show them in the browser in real time.

If you want to try it, watch it in action, grab the code or read on…

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Automatic CSS: The stylizator

20 Jun
2007

The stylizatorWriting CSS is good fun, but analyzing an html document to find how the page is structured us, at the very least, tiring. If you have ever had to write CSS for a blog or CMS template, you already know how time-consuming is to find every ID and CLASS in a large document. We’re going to write a simple script that takes an HTML file as input and gives us two things:

  • First, some CSS and Javascript to generate a visual structure with all the names like the one that can be seen at the top image (and a javascript only version!!).
  • Second, a CSS file without any rules, but with every ID and class in the document.

Let’s go:
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Three column layout with full page height

14 Jun
2007

The final result

Sometimes I wish I could do things that were easily done with table-based layouts but quite hard using just CSS.
Following a couple of posts in a CSS related Spanish mailing list (Ovillo), a guy called Zafonic showed me how to use negative margins and positive paddings to make equal sized columns. With a couple javascript functions, I patched it to fill the full browser window. Let’s see how…
Update: Error in code solved. Thanks to the testers Read the rest of this entry »

Clickmaps in sourceforge

21 Aug
2006

Today, all the code for creating clickmaps has been uploaded to sourceforge and made public under a GPL license. You can find it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/clickmaps

Thanks to jerret, the code now uses RMagick calls and it’s usable with logs sporting more than ten thousand clicks per page.

The definitive heatmap

16 Aug
2006

The final HeatmapAfter the interest shown about the clickmaps / heatmaps articles, I’ve decided to gather all the information into an easy to use system. What we are going to make is a complete solution that allows collecting, analyzing and showing the click information our users give us. Now, it works in web pages not center aligned and is quite a bit more robust. Read on… Read the rest of this entry »

How to make heat maps

6 Aug
2006

NOTE: This post has been improved at The definitive heatmap
There is not much documentation about creating heat maps. I haven’t been able to find an open source solution that, giving the coordinates, creates a heat map like those shown in Etre blog
In the last post (part 1, part 2) we got a list of click positions in a web page, but the result is easy to improve.

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Zero budget eye tracking. Clickmaps part 2

30 Jul
2006

In the first part of Zero budget eye tracking, we wrote a small script to keep track of the clicks in a web page. A couple of days after, we already have some information to analyze. Keep on reading to know how… Read the rest of this entry »

Zero budget eye tracking. Clickmaps.

28 Jul
2006

Eye tracking is quite expensive. The hardware and software have astounding capabilities, but sometimes it’s hard to justify the expenditure. But there is a technique that can imitate it until certain point. You can find where your users are clicking using just a bit of javascript and server side programming. Find out how… Read the rest of this entry »

Eye tracking para pobres. Parte 2

24 Jul
2006

En la primera parte del artículo escribimos un pequeño script para analizar la posición de los clicks en una página web. Despues de unas cuantas pruebas más, ya tenemos la información necesaria para hacer un pequeño análisis. Read the rest of this entry »

Eye tracking para pobres

17 Jul
2006

Los dispositivos de eye tracking son caros. Dan un rendimiento excepcional para analizar adónde miran los visitantes de un sitio web, pero a veces es dificil justificar la inversión. Si consigues convencer a tus testers para que hagan click en el punto al que miran, puedes sacar conclusiones… Read the rest of this entry »

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