Well the weekend is officially over, I didn’t get to do as much work as I would have liked to have done but at least I got a little bit done, I was mainly working on puppy directory when I was. Another one of my interests aside from web development is gadgets I have managed to collect quite a few over my time and this weekend i added to that collection with a nifty little RC Apache helicopter (indoor use only) I managed to find them on play for the outstanding price of £17.99 two days after I bought them the price went up to £29.99 (infact after just looking for the link it seems they have all gone) the only link I can see to it on play is for the reviews..

First impressions are well what can i say, i love it i can see hours of fun being had with this little toy flying it about the place, I know its only an indoor model but its superb and at the price I paid for it I think I had myself a bargain!!! Infact I ended up buying 4 as christmas presents for a few people, they are so easy to control and charging them up couldn’t be easier(ill try and get a video up at some point showing the helicopter in action), Im in the office right now giving it a go.

Apart from all of the above I also read an interesting article on Sitepoint today regarding twitter and its charging policies that might be put into place after a trial period over in Japan, according to the article premium accounts could charge their followers x amount to read their tweets. not sure if this will really take off if im honest as a lot of the tweets from the people I follow are sometimes just waffle or things that are not charge worthy. If you read the comments below the article itself there is a bit of conflicting information about this and some reports seem to point out that perhaps things where lost in translation when the announcement was made in Japan, twitter had announced on their Blog in Japan that this was incorrect and they where not going to be charging, its seems and I quote

The recent media reports are likely a result of a misunderstood presentation by a DG subsidiary, DG Mobile, about potential business opportunities that it could explore as a third party. DG Mobile’s presentation was unrelated and separate from the Twitter and Digital Garage partnership.

DG apologizes for this misunderstanding and for the delay in correcting the information. We hope this clarifies our commitment to helping Twitter Inc. continue to grow and enhance its free service for Japanese users.

So even though this story has been quashed by twitter it does make me think that this could perhaps be seen as a way of making some sought of revenue from twitter itself….

Im assuming that you have all heard of Woopra by now? if you haven’t then I would certainly recommend checking them out if you are into website Analytics and really like to see how your website is performing, now i know that the kind people over at Google offer their own version of Analytics and I use this myself on this website and every website that I create, the vast amount of information that can be gathered from the reports is amazing and can be very helpful in developing your website, but what Woopra offers over Google analytics is live statistics, as soon as a person comes onto your website you can track every move they make see what pages they are looking at, and get a better understanding of how people are using your website as well as get a good inclination on where you might be going wrong with certain pages. I was lucky enough to get on board during the beta development of Woopra and have stayed with them ever since, they have recently gone out of beta stage and started their payment scheme, now they still offer a free package but they limit the page views to 30,000 per month, this is the package I currently have me thinking that 30,000 page views per month for a single site is ok and I dont think ill be hitting that any time soon.

Well how wrong was I (image below from Goolge Analytics report), logging into Woopra this morning to look at the weekend statistics and it was showing nothing for both today and yesterday which was a bit odd i thought, I remembered that i did an update to the website on Saturday and perhaps i had accidently deleted the woopra code, on checking the code was still there so my next assumption was that something might have been up with the Woopra servers, after taking a look at their website everything seemed to be fine and everything was fine over the weekend so i was stumped, so after looking at the forum i found a post that described exactly what i was experiencing, after looking at the post and going through the steps that it had outlined i found out that my page views had hit its limit over 2 days ago so i wasnt getting any stats for the rest of the month, in a way im happy as Runnerslife is getting that amount of page views in a short period of time (well i think its quite good i mean its no bbc but its a start), but also a bit disgruntled as now i dont have any live stats unless i upgrade to a paying package which is something that will have to be discussed with the rest of the Runnerslife Team as this is a ongoing monthly cost, or do we just stick with what we have and then use google analytics as our main stats package and use Woopra as an added extra just to make comparisons with.  If you havent had a look at Woopra then I urge you to go and check it out and take a look at the many features that it currently has and also anything that is up and coming.

Google Website Analytics Statistics for Runnerslife

As you can see Runnerslife has slightly gone over the page views limit for this month, a bit of a spike over the last two days did help with this (a guest runners report that was well liked in America).

On another not not long now till I start my new Job in Fish in a Bottle, cant wait for this I am really looking forward to this and the challenges that it will bring im really hoping it will help advance my technical knowledge both in web development and design.

Thanks for reading.