Cheese can be a wonderful thing, but not all cheeses are created equal. For example Easy Cheese is filth, whereas Stinking Bishop is pure gold. The Cheese Macro in Confluence is great, but it’s a bit generic. It obviously wasn’t written with quality or localisation in mind. I find that it’s a bit too limited [...] Read more – ‘A better standard of cheese for your wiki’.
This post is a short video tutorial that shows how to create custom reports in Webtrends based on custom event tracking and custom dimensions. An important aspect to note at this point is that in sometimes Webtrends takes a long time to number crunch its reports — long after it reports that data analysis has [...] Read more – ‘Adding custom reports in Webtrends. A video tutorial.’.
This post is a short video tutorial that shows how to add custom dimensions to Webtrends. Having setup event tracking on Webtrends, you’ll likely want to build reports in the Webtrends admin UI. Even after adding event tracking JavaScript, reporting of your dimension or measure doesn’t just happen magically. Webtrends needs to know what to [...] Read more – ‘Adding custom dimensions in Webtrends. A video tutorial.’.
Recently I was helping a chemistry lecturer with some of her course notes. She authors her course notes in Confluence, then uses the “Export to PDF” functionality to create versions of her notes for distribution to the course participants. This workflow was suiting her nicely until she tried to export her pages. The course involves [...] Read more – ‘How to export Confluence pages containing equations to PDF’.
Thomas Emil Hansen recently wrote How do I write a user macro with “sections” and “panels” using the 4.0 HTML template? With Confluence 4, the storage format has changed from traditional wiki markup to an XML based storage format. This means that all those old wiki-markup based user macros are now overdue some TLC. Luckily, [...] Read more – ‘On converting wiki markup based user macros for use with Confluence 4’.
Want to use some “hot” new web fonts to pimp your Confluence wiki? It’s really straightforward. This post describes a method by which you can change all the headings to use web fonts hosted by Google. Read more – ‘Wiki web fonts’.
This is the second book by Luke Wroblewski that I’ve bought. His previous Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks is a book that I’d still recommend to anyone who’s likely to write a <form> tag. However the speed of change in browsing habits has been extraordinary since that book was published in 2008. This [...] Read more – ‘Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski’.
Here’s a quick and simple timesaver… 1. Open the current Finder folder in Terminal Setup Download “> cd to …“, copy it to your Applications folder, and then from the applications folder drag it into the Finder toolbar. Usage To use, just click the “> …” button on the toolbar 2. Open the current Terminal [...] Read more – ‘OS X: Moving from Finder to Terminal and back’.
When writing plugins using the Atlassian SDK, sometimes the builds take a little while and you go off doing other things. Maybe you’ll get diverted and lose a few minutes. It would be nice to have some kind of feedback/notification to let you know when the build is a success, fails or just when Tomcat [...] Read more – ‘Making the Atlassian SDK growl’.
In Webtrends, events that happens after the page loads can be tracked using dcsMultiTrack. This takes the following form: dcsMultiTrack( key1, value1, key2, value2, key3, value3, ... ); But what if you don’t know how many key/value pairs you’ll be sending into dcsMultiTrack? How do you call it then? Take advantage of the JavaScript apply [...] Read more – ‘A simple Webtrends event tracking tip’.
I recently spotted this fantastic Guardian article by Oliver Jeffers on how to draw penguins. Oliver is an illustrator and the author of Lost and Found — one of my favourite childrens book — brilliantly adapted for TV. Here’s the trailer. Read more – ‘How to draw a penguin’.
I’ve been accessing a Red Hat box via Mac Screen Sharing. All was good until it started just displaying a white screen. I assumed it was the fault of the Red Hat server, but couldn’t fix it at that end. It turns out that there’s some kind of bug in 64-bit Screen Sharing on Snow [...] Read more – ‘VNC Screen Sharing on OS X gives a white screen’.
This is a mirror of a previous article I wrote and maintained (between October 2009 & August 2010) while I was working at the University of Nottingham. It’s included here as an archive. Here’s the simple steps required to get your University email account sync’d with your iPhone. From the Home screen, select Settings Select [...] Read more – ‘How to setup University of Nottingham email on an iPhone’.
People have been shouting from the rooftops that Confluence 4 has finally arrived. Despite all the hype, it’s a cracking release. I’m not going to list all the features here, as you can find them elsewhere. However I will mention one… The new editor Simply put, it’s fast, slick and gorgeous looking. It works better [...] Read more – ‘Confluence 4 — wiki markup is *dead*, _long live_ wiki markup’.
Often when writing web apps, it’s nice to report errors (or just some kind of event) to the user in a calm and unassuming manner, but at the same time flag these events to the developers in an entirely different and likely more geeky manner. One way of doing this is simply to log the [...] Read more – ‘HTML5 data attributes are made to #measure’.
Last Tuesday, I went down to the National Archives at Kew, attended the London Atlassian User Group and presented a talk on “Confluence and Analytics”. In the morning there was a meet up with Atlassian plugin developers from all over northern Europe. We discussed amongst other things Adaptavist’s new plugin licensing system and Active Objects [...] Read more – ‘London Atlassian User Group – April 2011’.
On Monday, I travelled down to the beautiful city of Bath to attend The Big M — “a brand new independent mobile focused event aimed at those who want to learn from and connect with the very best people in the industry.” Read more – ‘The Big M Conference in Bath’.
A few days ago I got my hands on a copy of Confluence 3.5. Atlassian are billing this as their “biggest release ever”, and a casual glance at the release notes suggests that this is true. There’s a whole host of real improvements bundled with this release. Here’s a rundown of some of the stand [...] Read more – ‘A first look at Confluence 3.5’.
The University of Nottingham started using Concur‘s online travel & expense management system towards the end of 2010. They needed a simple method of accessing the Concur system from their travel and expenses documentation (hosted in Confluence) without addtitional authentication prompts. A SAML-based single sign-on plugin for Confluence was rapidly designed and built over the [...] Read more – ‘Concur Single Sign-On plugin for Confluence using SAML’.
Confluence users often ask me how the Confluence permissions model works. A reoccurring theme is the ability (or lack thereof) to selectively show or hide comments in a space on an ad-hoc basis. The current feature set of Confluence allows you to either enable or disable comments on a per space basis. For some users [...] Read more – ‘More flexible commenting in Atlassian’s Confluence’.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again — I like to #measure. Google Analytics has a great feature called Advanced Segments. Using this feature, you can easily show a subset of data. Sharing advanced segments with other users One of the ways I use advanced segments is to categorise traffic into user types. [...] Read more – ‘Google Analytics Tip: Use Advanced Segments’.
Last week I released Analytics Plugin for Confluence 1.2 on the Atlassian Plugin Exchange. It’s been 6 months since the initial release which was only tested on Confluence 3.0. This time I’ve added a new dashboard section, full support for Confluence 3.1 & 3.2 and a pile of macro parameters as requested by Guy Fraser. [...] Read more – ‘Analytics Plugin for Confluence 1.2 released’.
This website and one or two others I run recently experienced what appeared to be a denial-of-service attack. Looking at the access logs, I could see several tens of thousands of requests all originating from a range of amazonaws.com IP addresses. All with the useragent “bitlybot”. This post is a quick postmortem of what went [...] Read more – ‘Bitten a lot by a bitlybot’.
Update: 2011-09-20 With the release of Confluence 4.0, this post obsolete. A simple Confluence user macro to hide access to the View Wiki Markup menu link… {hide-wiki-markup} One thing I love about Confluence is the way that you can browse other people’s pages and steal their superior layout ideas for your own wiki pages. It’s [...] Read more – ‘Hide wiki markup – Confluence user macro’.
In light of the newly changed UK government and recent blogpost about Google Suggest, I thought I’d check the current state of the nation’s thoughts as predicted by Google UK. How? Type part of a sentence in the search form, then sit back and wait for the concerns of the people to be revealed. Read more – ‘What we really want to know about UK politics – Google Suggest reveals all’.
I’ve previously written a number of posts about Confluence and Google Analytics (GA), including how to set up GA on Confluence and pointers for GA reports you should consider. Lastly, I wrote the Confluence Google Analytics Plugin (CGAP) which provides space specific GA reports from within Confluence. However, I’ve not been entirely happy because there [...] Read more – ‘Meta tags are your friend part 2: Space specific tracking in Confluence with Google Analytics’.
At work, we use Sungard HE‘s Luminis portal (v3.3) — It’s been good to us over the years, but there’s a lack of usage information regarding users’ roles and their interactions with Luminis. In the past, we’ve added Google Analytics to Luminis to track the interactions, but never managed to fully segment user roles. Until [...] Read more – ‘Meta tags are your friend part 1: Tracking roles in Sungard Luminis with Google Analytics’.
Please fix the search UI in Safari on the iPhone. I’ve been using the iPhone for some time now and overall, the interface is really slick. The buttons are consistently placed and this gives a really strong user experience. Everything appears to be in the obvious place. The trouble is, I like to search the [...] Read more – ‘Dear Apple Inc.’.
I recently started building Confluence plugins. The first one being my Google Analytics plugin for Confluence. This post outlines my “journey” into Confluence plugin development. It documents a beginner’s pitfalls when developing with the Atlassian Plugin SDK. Hopefully others can learn from, or at least laugh at my mistakes. Where I was starting from: No [...] Read more – ‘Some thoughts on developing my first Confluence plugin’.
I’m pleased to announce the release of my first Confluence plugin — Google Analytics plugin for Confluence. It lists Google Analytics reports for a particular Confluence space – from within that space. The current version has 10 reports and shows the first 20 results for each report. Top Content Depth of Visit Internal Search Browser [...] Read more – ‘Announcing: Google Analytics plugin for Confluence’.
Here are the slides from a talk I gave at the European Luminis User Group in Nottingham last week. Outlined are some thoughts behind reusable UI elements in the Luminis portal at the University of Nottingham. Portal UI Design Patterns Read more – ‘Portal UI Design Patterns’.
We run Confluence with the (default) en_GB locale and language. For our purposes, some of the boilerplate text needs changing. This post describes how to solve this problem with a partial British English language pack that overrides only part of the Confluence interface text. Read more – ‘Changing boilerplate text in Confluence’.
…or how to display attachments in an unordered list. Something that bugs me in Confluence is the way that attachments are shown. The default view is a big table with just about all the information related to each attachment. This is great if you want all this detail, but I’m a simple soul with simple [...] Read more – ‘A simpler way to view attachments in Confluence’.
Here’s a quick screencast I made to show how easy it is to add custom segments – e.g. based on country/territory – to Google Analytics. There’s no audio. Sorry. Adding custom segments to Google Analytics from David Simpson on Vimeo. Read more – ‘Adding custom segments to Google Analytics’.
Having installed Google Analytics on Confluence, you need to ensure that you’re not lost in a world of pretty metrics. Make sure that your new analytics toy produces something solid and actionable. Anything less is just a shiny curiosity that your organisation will soon fail to engage with. This article presents 4 useful tips that [...] Read more – ‘4 Useful Tips on Google Analytics Reporting for Confluence’.
If you’re using the Verdana typeface in your printed documents, stop now. There is no need and it is helping destroy the planet. Verdana takes up about 19% more horizontal space than Arial. So a switch away from Verdana could reduce your paper costs by up to 19%. For further savings, switch to duplex printing [...] Read more – ‘Verdana must die for the good of the planet’.
Want to know who are the most active users on your Confluence wiki this week? This wiki markup snippet should help. It tabulates: Overall activity Page creations Page Updates Page views Page Popularity h1. This Week's Wiki User Activity Charts h2. Overall {topusers:spaces=@all|timespan=1w|period=weekly|events=create,update,view|display=icon,title,count} h2. Breakdown <code> || Page Creation || Page Updates [...] Read more – ‘Confluence Snippet: User Activity Report’.
I love Confluence. It’s simple. It’s easy to use. It’s hierarchical, so you can build a nice structure. But… I hate Confluence. I can’t find anything. Ever. It’s hierarchical, but which branch in the hierarchy is my content located in? Damnit, the Lucene powered search doesn’t seem to be able to find what I’m searching [...] Read more – ‘Templating Confluence for enhanced usability’.
Updated 2011-06-30: Changed to asynchronous Google Analytics tracking You’ve chosen Confluence as your Enterprise wiki and got it installed. People are using it. But how many people? You could have a look at the Global Activity page on Confluence, but this might confuse matters. You’ll get to see graphs, but what do they really mean? [...] Read more – ‘Tracking Atlassian Confluence usage with Google Analytics’.
If someone using a desktop Twitter client (such as TweetDeck or Twirl) clicks on a link I’ve posted to my blog, the Google Analytics referer information will be blank. It registers as direct traffic to the website. This is fine when linking to other people’s websites — I’m not worried about them — but I’d [...] Read more – ‘Tracking referers to your website from Twitter clients with Google Analytics’.
If your website contains Flash movies that link offsite or to microsites, you may wish to register the offsite link using WebTrends. This article provides an introduction. It assumes a little knowledge of ActionScript, Javascript as well as WebTrends. This example uses a intermediary javascript function that sits between the Flash movies and the WebTrends [...] Read more – ‘How To Track Events in Flash Movies using WebTrends’.
The slides from a presentation I’m giving today at the European Luminis User Group (ELUG) meeting at the University of Greenwich. Google Analytics and Sungard HE Luminis View more presentations from dvdsmpsn. (tags: google analytics) Read more – ‘Google Analytics and SungardHE Luminis’.
To find out which of the UK’s national newspapers has the best readability, I chose a news story at random that was recently covered in each of the newspapers. I tested the readability of each newspaper’s article using my own online readability testing tool. Read more – ‘Discover Britain’s easiest to read online newspaper’.
I’ve just released the first version of The Readability Testing Tool. It takes either a supplied URI, or directly inputted text. Indices measured Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease Flesch Kincaid Grade Level Gunning Fog Score Coleman Liau Index Automated Readability Index. Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease is a scale of 0-100. A high score means the text [...] Read more – ‘Online Readability Test’.
This is a step by step guide for building a find nearest/store locator for free in PHP just like Postcode Anywhere. It requires PHP and a mySQL database. That’s all. You don’t need Google Maps, but it helped me populating the database, so I’ve included it for completeness. The example I’m using is UK based, [...] Read more – ‘Find nearest store page using PHP, mySQL and Google Maps’.
Since I last added Google Analytics to a website, Google have changed from the old urchin.js file to the shiny new ga.js file. This means that I really ought to start using ga.js now. The University of Nottingham uses Sungard’s Luminis portal system which produces some rather nasty looking URLs. Web analytics for this is [...] Read more – ‘jGoogleAnalytics – Google Analytics integration for jQuery’.
