Mining Google Analytics data with Bit.ly links

January 23, 2011

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter – Who’s the cooler audience?

Using Google Analytics, you’re able to track information about your site, its performance, and other cool information such as traffic sources, medium, and campaign information. Being connected and using social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you would want to know which social network produces the highest impact on traffic to your site. In essence, what you really need to do is create three separate links and then shorten it with Bit.ly.

I recently wrote a quick script that does just that – allows embedding of Google campaign information, and produces three separate links to be shortened using Bit.ly’s API. For the code to connect to Bit.ly’s API, I found the code snippet on David Walsh’s site.

#epicfail with SELinux and Remi Repository

January 12, 2011

Earlier I’ve been working on an enterprise application running on Drupal. One of the modules required that I update to a PHP 5.2. The server I am using is CentOS release 5.5. Typically, on all my servers I run Ubuntu 10.04 (latest version is 10.10), and I have no issues when it comes to updating any of the packages. CentOS, on the other hand, works in a completely different way. The latest PHP package in their repository is 5.0 or 5.1, and its updates aren’t as frequent as other releases. Ubuntu updates its repositories on a continuous basis, and checks to make sure that certain software packages work with their system before releasing it to the public for download.

My hurdle to get PHP updated with CentOS is to switch to a different repository. I began by installing remi and epel which are up to date.

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-5*.rpm epel-release-5*.rpm

Once this was installed, I simply had to update PHP, right?

Email Design for Outlook 2007

December 10, 2010

This is a real quick post because of the love-hate relationship I’ve developed for crappy software like IE6 and the rendering engine for Outlook 2007. Since nearly anyone and everyone uses Microsoft Outlook (majority rules), you have to deal with their problems. Outlook 2000 users, need not worry about this post.

There comes a time in every developer’s designer’s life that requires them to design an email template for a company. If you’ve ever worked with CSS and shifted away from tables and moved onto divs, you’ll find that you might have to go back to how things were done before.

The solution to IE6

October 28, 2010

This post simply allows me to express my deepest feelings for the failed browser, but still very much alive, IE6 (Internet Explorer version 6). On my way to work, I think about the headaches I may receive. I think about the worst moments of my day and how it would likely have a connection to IE6. Coffee machine not working… IE6, network crashed….IE6, driving on a spare (donut) tire because the first one has a hole in it… IE6. You get the picture.

Setting up an IP Tables Firewall in Linux

July 22, 2010

Over the past couple years, I found myself spending more time with Linux servers. I generally work with Ubuntu servers but more recently began swimming in the yum’s and rpm’s of CentOS. Although each server requires specific configurations and fine tuning, my general starting point after creating a user account was setting up a firewall.

There are various software firewalls available for each distribution. The one I’ve used most is IP Tables, and setting up is relatively straight forward.

Start by viewing your current configuration (if available)

sudo iptables -L

This command will allow you to view the current set of rules that exist. To start on a clean slate, I would recommend saving all your rules to a file. Let’s start by flushing the existing rules.

sudo iptables -F