Real Time Stats and Communication for Your Blog or Site

I love trying new things to make my sites more interactive and cool. I recently found a cool app that allows you to have real-time stats on your site as well as the ability to chat with a specific visitor on your site.

Woopra is the first step into what will be the future for websites and blogs. Imagine being able to see who is on your site, where they are from, what operating system they are using, and how long they have been there in real-time. Woopra uses a desktop client to monitor your sites.

INSTALLATION

Installation is very easy. When you get your account they give you a small piece of Javascript to put on your site. Once the script is on your site you will instantly start receiving information about your visitors.

USE

The desktop client is easy to use and looks great. It gives you as much information as any other stat tool but it allows for real-time interaction with your visitors.

PRICE

Currently the beta is free. They plan to have both free and paid services.

Currently it is still in private beta but if they let me have an account, they should let anyone have one. (Actually these invites are so hard to get that someone sold theirs on Ebay!) If you are interested check them out and sign up.

Automatically Synchronize All Your Firefox Browsers

If you use multiple computers and have several Firefox browsers that you use on a regular basis you will know the headaches caused by having different settings, bookmarks, history, cookies, and saved passwords. I actually use about four different Firefox installs. I have three computers I use on a daily basis and a USB thumb drive with a portable Firefox install. I needed all of these to automatically sync with each other. This is how I did it...

Get a Google account

The add on that syncs your browser uses a Google account to store the sync info. To do this click here then fill out all of the information. Make sure your account is active and then move on the the next step.

Get the Addon

1. Click this link to go to the download page for the Firefox add-on.
2. Click on the link that says "browsersync.xpi"
3. Click "Agree and Install", then click "Install" on the next window that pops up.
4. Let the program install and then let your browser restart.

Activate the Addon

1. Make sure you have your Google account information available because you will need it.
2. Follow the on screen instructions that will appear before your browser starts back up.

Add It to All of Your Firefoxes.

If this is going to help you at all you must install it on all of your personal browsers.

And that's all. Right now this only works for Firefox 2. Support for Firefox 3 should be coming out soon.


***Update***
If you are only interested in syncing your bookmarks, then check out Foxmarks. The version is still in beta but they are allowing anyone to sign up. I use it now and it works great. Click here to create an account.

Save XP!

According to InfoWorld, Windows XP will no longer be sold after June 30, 2008. For those of us who are not big fans of the resource hogging Vista, this will be a blow to our sanity (not to mention our wallets). InfoWorld has started a "Save XP Petition". I understand that many people wish that Microsoft would just die and let Linux and OS X reign, understand that many of us would like a choice. For many, Vista is not a viable option for computing. It is slow, bloated, and buggy. Not to mention that there are five different versions available to choose from ranging from $129 -$399 for a OS! I am not saying that we should kill Vista and everyone go back to XP (although that doesn't sound too bad of an idea!) but Microsoft is making a stupid decision just to push their new OS. Sign the petition and hopefully MS will listen to the people who pay their bills - the end user!

Bathroom Tech...

If you ask anyone who knows me well they will tell you that I am totally obsessed with tech. Having said that, I also believe there is tech that is contributing to heinous violence in our country as well as spreading death and disease. Anyone who has been forced to interact with these electronics from hell will agree with me explicitly. Among the offenders are as follows:

1. Automatic Flushing Toilets

Urinals aren't so bad but the stall version was designed by terrorist trying to overthrow the western world. Toilets in of themselves are gross, so most places are starting to put those nice paper seat cover dispensers in the stall. Automatic toilets mock those who wish to protect the purity of their posterior. I was in a Walmart not long ago when nature called in a big way (yeah I know, too much info). So I go into the wonderful Walmart bathroom and proceed to cover the seat with the paper protection. I get it just right and turned to sit and the toilet flushes sucking down the seat cover, as I am hovering over the seat preparing for a landing. Now I'm a patient man but this is not funny, I quickly grab another and get it just right turn and goosh! This happens four times. By now nature is not only calling it's texting, emailing and paging me all at the same time. I grab the seat cover throw it down, spin around, and plop down just a split second before it flushes....Success!

2. Automatic Faucets

So I answer nature's call and proceed to the sink. ...it's “automatic”... I say a quick prayer and stick my hand under the faucet... nothing... (I love how automatic these things are!) So like anyone who has encountered one of these monsters, I start waving my hands all around like I'm directing a symphony orchestra until the tiny stream of water comes out. Yay, success.

3. Automatic Soap Dispensers

Now that my hands are almost wet I reach for the soap ...it too is “automatic”... I start directing my orchestra, but this demon is too smart for that. Just as I get my hand in the right place it waits a second and then spits out a microscopic amount into the sink, not in my hand. Then it waits before serving anymore soap to the sink so that we greedy bathroom users won't waste it on things as trivial as washing our hands. When you finally out smart the sneaky soap squirter, you then have to find the sweet spot for the sparse stream again.

4. Automatic Hand Dryer

Now that my hands are nearly clean, I proceed to dry my hands. There are two kinds of hand dryers to choose from, the kind that blows your hands dry in a little less than an hour, and the paper kind that kills trees but takes just a fraction of the time to use. This should be easy right? Wrong! Since I have now spent nearly two hours trying to do what would take just a few minutes at home, I don't have the time or patience to deal with the blow dryer, so I try my luck with the paper towel kind. I walk up to it and it has this picture of a waving hand just over top a dark glossy spot with a red light in the middle of it. (I really think that red light is a camera that sends a direct feed to the Terrorist Funniest Home Videos network.) So you walk up this thing start flailing your arms around until a single sheet slowly descends. Of course this is never enough. So once again you have to wait for a while before it will work again (an effort so keep you from using it for what it was made for). After finally getting enough you walk out of the bathroom enraged about how that someone made something as simple as using the bathroom such a painful process. Continuous encounters with this system will either turn someone into a homicidal maniac or they will die of some kind of strange bathroom disease because they skipped the whole painful sanitation process entirely.

If you look below at the statistics that I've made up, you can see how since these things have been placed into bathrooms, violence has gone up while life expectancy has gone down. Unless these bathroom torture devices are not corrected America will continue to decline until it will be completely destroyed.

C.G. Quick Tip: Email on the Fly

I recently found this easy way of emailing someone on the fly. If you use Firefox this is very easy.

1. In Firefox, right click on the bookmarks toolbar.

2. Click "New Bookmark..."

3. In the "Name" box, type something like "Email the Boss".

4. In the "Location" box, type "mailto:(enter-email-address-here)" (without the quotes)

5. Click "Add" and you are done. You now have a single click way of emailing whoever you want.

Not Geeky News But Still Awesome!!!

This blog usually features cool geekery but today is going to be a little different. My wife and I are having a baby and yesterday (April 1, 2008) we had an ultra-sound and we found out that we are going to be having a boy!! We are very happy. (especially since my boss has nine daughters and no boys!) I had heard that people who play with electronics too much are not able to have boys after a while. (case and point; my boss) Either this is an old wives tale or I was just lucky. Anyway, his due date is July 6th. We plan to name him Robert Steven Reed, after his grandfathers names. Pray for us during this time and I promise to bring you more geek stuff soon. I am planning on writing a post on how to build yourself a rock-solid $250 computer, with step by step pictures and directions. I have built this same computer for about five different people and have had zero problems with it. My aim is a fast, easily upgradeable, inexpensive, all around good computer. I, however, will have to wait until someone orders one again from me, because I really am a really cheap geek and can't afford my own wares.

Save Hundreds Every Year on Ink with a Virtual Printer!

It is strange that we spend more on ink for our printers than we do for the printer it self. Even the most expensive printer will quickly be double by the cost of a few replacement cartridges. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to virtually print and save your documents, web pages, email, and receipts? Then you have to check out a cool little app called PrimoPDF. PrimoPDF is a app that will take any printable document and turn what would be a physical printout into a PDF document. This program is totally free and does not leave a watermark on your PDF like other "free" virtual printers do. I use this all of the time to make PDFs to save web pages or to send a word doc to a friend or to make a large Publisher document easy to save.

Here is How It Works...

1. Download it



















2. Install it





















3. Use it

1. In whatever program you are in, go to file --> Print

2. Choose the new PrimoPDF Printer from the drop down menu

3. Click print


4. Save it
- This screen might take a few seconds to appear especially if you have a older computer. This screen will allow you to set any settings you will need. Most of the time you can just click create PDF without changing anything.

- If you are intending on emailing your PDF after it is made you can make it do it automatically by setting the Post Process to "Mail PDF".

That's it. This program has saved me hours of pain and tons of money. Check it out, I think you'll like it.