Compact Calendar 2009

The power of the human voice is such that when someone called me up to ask me about the 2009 version of the Compact Calendar, I was so moved that I actually got off my butt to make it. Easier said than done; I said it would take about 15 minutes + about an hour to post. Four hours later, I'm finally done with tweaking, testing, download testing, virus scanning, packaging, and updating. It takes a bit of work to make sure these archives are clean...hopefully I didn't miss anything. I almost posted a version that was off by one day...close call!

What Is It?

The Compact Calendar is my impromptu planning calendar, designed to be printed on paper from Excel. Print a bunch of these sheets out; it's great for bringing to a meeting and sketching out a schedule on-the-fly. I keep a supply on hand when I'm actively out in the field. Unlike other calendars, it represents the months as a solid "bar of time", which makes it easier to visualize how much time you really have. Plus, it just looks neat.

You can read more about the use and design of the Compact Calendar on the Compact Calendar Page.

What's New

I finally have a version that will update the entire calendar when you change the year field at the top of the spreadsheet, based on the work of Todd Foster. So now, it's super easy to make new versions of the calendar yourself for any arbitrary year. Just remember to update the Holiday Table.

"Jenny" and Jim Service both submitted techniques for handling the automatic month labeling on the left side, and I've incorporated it.

There have been several other modifications submitted to me over the year, and I've tried to pick the ones that are simple to maintain (e.g. they don't require additional Excel modules, or tricky hidden extra columns). Thanks everyone for your submissions!

Check It Out

You can download the 2009 version at the regular Compact Calendar Page. I have only updated the US version; the international versions are handled by independent bloggers and are not under my control at all. I just link to them!

You'll need Office 1997 or later to open the Excel Templates. Personally I have been using Office 2007, so there may be some issues with earlier versions of Office that I don't know about. Please leave a comment if you come across anything. For users of non-Office productivity suites, good luck!

Academic Year Compact Calendar

Here's a quickie:

Professor (and reader) Jim Mitchell adapted a version of the Compact Calendar for the U.S. academic school year, with a few tweaks of his own!

You can download his version of the academic compact calendar from Jim's blog, Architectural Education.

Thanks Jim!

A New Pen for a New Notebook

A good friend of mine recently went to London, and on return announced she'd gotten me a present that was not very "London", but was likely very "Dave". I was in San Jose at the time, however, and had to wait a week until I got to see it, which gave me plenty of time to think of what it might be. Gifts are an interesting window into friendship, as they give you an idea of how you are being perceived. In the worst case they are way off the mark, but in the best case they illuminate something that's more fundamental and perhaps unexpected.

When I finally got to see what it was, I was somewhat surprised to see it was a leather notebook. I'm super picky about notebooks and stationery, so this was a bold move (though I doubt it was realized at the time of selection). I am a fan of sturdy tightly-bound journals and durable papers; my current favorite carry-around is the Moleskine Reporter format. The new notebook was pretty much the opposite of my Moleskine. It was just a sleeve of hand-tooled leather, decorated with repeating die stamps. A sheaf of fluffy textured paper was cut to fit into the sleeve, and held in place with a long string that was punched through the spine in three places, which also wrapped around the entire notebook to keep it tidy. After the initial surprise wore off, I was struck by the idea that this notebook binding might have been the way it was done long ago, and that this could be some kind of replica or artifact. I loved it.

No, it was nothing of the sort; it was just something she saw that she thought I'd like, perhaps because I am constantly hauling out tiny notebooks and am writing in them at the coffee shop. I've been getting away from computers more and more these days when I'm thinking, as I find making marks by hand engages a different part of my brain. I feel more connected to the ideas, and the lack of "undo" makes me more mindful of what I put down. I use my Moleskines as daily working notebooks and have learned to treat them as "sacred scrap paper", but this notebook was just the sort of thing I knew I would have great difficulty writing in. The kind of words I would write in such a notebook would have to carry their weight in artfulness or importance. I would hate to blemish such a notebook with anything less.

"You know, I don't know what I would write in this," I admitted as I examined it further. "It's so nice."

"You'll write ideas for stories in it!" my friend proclaimed vigorously. "Things you hear other people say, phrases like that one we keep wanting to use...uh, what was it..."

"It was 30 degrees above warm?"

"Yep, phrases like that! And other ones that you come up with." And that was the end of the discussion.

It's not very often that I get a present that so successfully combines so many personal quirks and goals into one package, so I was doubly-impressed. Of course I didn't want to use any old crappy pen, so I started looking around for a nice fountain pen that I could carry with me along with the notebook. I found that Pilot makes a $1.89 disposable fountain pen that apparently writes fairly well and would be a good test. I tried my local Staples to see if they carried it (they do on the Website), but they only had a few mediocre-looking pens in stock for more money than I was willing to spend. A bit more Googling revealed the fascinating cult of fountain pens and moleskines that already exists. I took note of a few brands that were mentioned, and decided to just keep my eyes open for stationery stores. For some reason, we don't seem to have them in New Hampshire, so it would have to wait until next time I headed south.

I was visiting my sister last weekend in Rhode Island for fun, and we stopped by one of her favorite stores, Figments, which is run by a RISD graduate / graphic designer named Peggy. It's a small store that stocks an eclectic variety of stationery, furniture, one-of-a-kind gifts, and other tasteful artifacts. I'd been there once before, having gotten excited by some aluminum binder covers that I didn't end up buying because I (again) didn't know what I would put in them...they were so cool :-) This time, I saw that Peggy carried a handful of the German Lamy pens pens I'd read about online, though it took me a few moments to remember this. I got the Safari, which is regarded as an inexpensive and reliable fountain pen, in a color I am very fond of. My sister commented how she doesn't ordinarily like fountain pens because they feel scratchy and catch on the paper, but the Lamy was very pleasurable and smooth. She called me up later to say that she wanted to go get one. :-)

I actually haven't tried writing in the notebook yet with this, because I haven't yet heard or thought of any interesting phrases to put into it. I also want to get some brown ink, so it looks extra-ancient when I write in it, but in the meantime I'm willing to use the blue cartridge that came with it. I am a little concerned that the paper will be too porous for the fountain pen, but I will try it out later this week and see what happens. It may be that the other pen I got at Figments, a Lamy Vista Rollerball, will work. I wasn't planning on getting this pen, but I was sharing a story with the owner about how there was a certain green Pilot rollerball pen in the 80s that I used to love writing with. My enthusiasm must have triggered something, because she hauled out this pen and had me try it. As I doodled, I got lost in the action of the pen...it was very smooth, and ink flowed out of it effortlessly. It has been a long time since I've used a pen that made me want to make marks on paper...not since that green Pilot in the 80s, actually. My current everyday rollerball is the Pilot G2, but this pen has more resistance and is kind of scratchy. It reminds me of work. The Lamy Rollerball reminded me of recess on a warm spring day, drawing endless doodles on the picnic table with my friends by the soccer field.

So I have my notebook, and I have my pens. I'm looking forward to making some marks on paper next time I'm in the coffee shop.

A Chindogu Social Yardstick

Last weekend was Barcamp Manchester in Manchester, New Hampshire, which had a pretty good turnout of around 50 people. This year there was a new event, The Make Room, made possible by the donation of several awesome Make Magazine Boxed Set collections by O'Reilly Books. The various books were handed out throughout the day to the people who obviously needed them, and the Box Sets were reserved as prizes for the Make Room contests.

I first entered the Popsicle Stick Bridge Building Competition, but alas: my clever design relied on craftsmanship to implement correctly. I ended up pulling out of the contest, but this left me with leftover parts for the Chindogu Competition.

Chindogu is the Japanese art of inventing items that solve a problem which are burdened with unfortunate and/or embarrassing side effects that, for all practical purposes, render the invention useless. I seem to enjoy making things in this vein: the Procrastinator's Clock and the Gauntlet of Productivity are two such items that I've posted about in the past. Apparently the muse is still with me; I'm very pleased to present the prize-winning chindogu of Barcamp Manchester 2007, an invention I call The Social Yardstick.

INTRODUCING THE SOCIAL YARDSTICK

The Social Yardstick allows you to always maintain an appropriate distance from the people you care about.

Physically, The Yardstick is a measuring device that collapses to fit in your pocket. The prototype here is constructed out of popsicle sticks and packing tape. Each popsicle stick is labeled a listed below:

• Acquaintance -- This is someone you know only slightly.
• Co-Worker -- Someone you work with regularly, but probably not daily. Casual friends too.
• Co-Conspirator -- Someone you are working with, perhaps sharing a hidden agenda or personal goal. You're close, but not too close.
• Best Friend -- Someone you're pretty close with. They're inside your personal space.
• Close Family -- That is, family members that you actually like.
• Sweetie -- You've slept together. Or really want to.
• You -- This is the end of The Yardstick you hold.

The idea for The Social Yardstick was trigged by something that Lokesh Dhakar said at the table I was working at. I was stretching my popsicle sticks (leftover from my failed bridge) in an accordion-like fashion, and he said something about measuring space. I then thought of a time when some friends of mine were having a secret office romance; I'd observed them talking one day standing way too close together to be casual co-workers. I mentioned this to my friend later in case they didn't want to blow their cover. If they had some way of measuring that space between themselves, they could have maintained discretion with ease! And thus, the Social Yardstick idea was born.

The basic principle: your physical distance from someone often telegraphs how "close" you are. Here's a diagram to help illustrate the point:

In case you're wondering: the distances in the diagram are roughly based on what "felt right", though I can see now that it seems roughly based on the width of a person's body.

USING THE YARDSTICK

To use The Social Yardstick, merely unfold its length and stretch between yourself and the person you are standing near. Read the label on the segment that is closest to the other person, and adjust your distance appropriately. Here are some other example uses:

• If you are talking to someone you consider an acquaintance and he/she is standing too close, deploy The Yardstick and make sure that your allocation of personal space is not violated.

• Conversely, if you're hanging out with your sweetie, use The Yardstick to close the gap: nothing quite says "I Love You" than ensuring you're both inside each other's personal space, short of...well, you get the idea.

You can also use The Social Yardstick as a relationship discovery tool. Say you are in a situation where you are trying to figure out the relationships between two people so you'll have something to talk about at the water cooler. While both parties are standing in place, have the first person hold the stick close to their body and stretch it toward the second person. The label on the stick segment closest to the second person will reveal their actual relationship! You may be surprised by what you find! Just remember: as with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, the act of directly observing your subjects will alter the measurement (e.g. people cough, avert eye contact, and move apart). You may need to apply indirect means of observation over several sessions to arrive at a conclusive reading.

The pre-calibrated distances on The Social Yardstick are based on Urban New England Standards of Personal Space, which is what I'm most familiar with. You may find that you need to adjust for the differing expectations of your locale and culture. For example, people who live in sparsely-populated rural areas probably need a longer yardstick. Likewise, people who work in loud office environments may have to stand closer to just hear each other. And all bets are off when you're in an elevator or picking a urinal in the Men's Restroom.

If you have built your own Social Yardstick or have made something similar in the past, let us know in the comments below! Support Social Unity through Appropriate Personal Spacing!

:-)

Mint versus Google Analytics

NOTE: This article covers the OLD version of Google Analytics at the time of this writing. The current version of Analytics, launched in 2007, is much different.

At the end of October, I moved to a new server and decided to stop using the web traffic logging provided by Mint. There were three reasons behind this decision:

1. I was spending way too much time checking my stats.

2. Someone mentioned to me that the size of my WordPress database was surprisingly large. Let me guess...you're running stats? went the comment.

3. I was reading in the old host's acceptable use policy for databases that stat logging was specifically disallowed. Ooops.

So I dropped Mint and tried surviving on Google Analytics and the free version of Statcounter. That experiment has ended today, and I've decided to reinstall Mint.

Why I Track Stats

Since the vast majority of blog visitors do not leave comments, watching web statistics is one of the primary feedback mechanisms that help me assess what's going on with my writing. The raw numbers of interest to a blogger are page views and unique visitors; it's very satisfying to see the numbers slowly rise over time. When there's a big spike in traffic, that often means that there is something interesting going on elsewhere on the Internet with my name attached to it somehow, and that's good to know.

Also of interest are search terms used to find the site, popular content, and who has linked to me. To a lesser extent, I'm also interested in what outbound links people are clicking on. This gives me a view of how people are using the site, what's popular, what's not, and what's surprising. I once saw a whole bunch of hits from a webmail system from a university, and I later learned that The Printable CEO™ stuff had been making the rounds there. Fascinating!

All three stat trackers I've mentioned rely on Javascript to tickle a webservice on a server to log a visit. The advantage of these services over regular web server log analyzers (Analog, Webalyzer, HTTPAnalyze) is realtime statistics; I can see what's going on at any time of the day to watch trends unfold. With a server log package, the stats are usually available at the end of the day, when it's too late to do anything about a rise in traffic.

Anyway, the javascript-based stat trackers require that there's a webservice for the database to communicate with. For Google Analytics and Statcounter, the servers are under their control. With Mint, you use your website as the server (requirements: a PHP-enabled web server and a MySQL database). Here's how they compare:

Comparing Cost

• Mint costs $30/site, and logs everything to your own MySQL database.

• Google Analytics is free and doesn't have any limits I know of. UPDATE: It might actually not store data past a month, not sure.

• Statcounter is free for up to 100 logged visits at a time. For site that gets more than 50-100 hits a day, you'll need to pay a monthly fee (minimum: $9 for 1000 hits logged, $29 gets you 25K).

I keep the free version of StatCounter enabled because I've always used it, so I can see the the history of web traffic from the day I started blogging.

Comparing Realtime Utility

• Mint reports activity to the minute, and is extendable through plugins (called "Peppers") that add additional tracking capabilities. You can get a list of Mint plugins to see what extensions have already been authored.

• Statcounter is also up-to-date on a minute-by-minute basis. However, the aforementioned log limit for the free version makes trendwatching over several days difficult without paying at least $29/month. Since Mint itself costs $30 for one-time use, it's a better deal.

• Google Analytics is not up-to-the-minute. It seems to take between 4 hours-24 hours to update with the latest data. This is far better than the week it took when the service was hammered by new registrants, but still Mint and Statcounter handily trounce it. Google Analytics is getting faster, but the delay is such that I don't feel it's particularly real-time.

Comparing Quality of Experience

• Mint's front end is attractive, robust, and highly useful. The base installation is good for tracking data over a period of time, searches, and referrers. With extensions, you can track downloads, outclicks, and trends, all within the same slickly-designed GUI. Thumbs up! Very Web 2.0! The one thing that is missing is visitor tracking; I know there is a SessionTracker plugin, but it's not as useful as Statcounter's implementation.

• Statcounter looks more like an old-school web app, but it provides lots of useful ways of digging through the actual behaviors of your site visitors. In this regard I like it better than Mint, particularly for its visitor tracking capabilities. You can start with a hit from a search result, and then track the trail of page visits to see how people are exploring your site. The SessionTracker pepper for Mint does allow you to see visitor paths, but it doesn't let you track from the very first hit. It is essentially a stand-alone plugin co-existing in the same UI shell, so it can't integrate the data from other parts of Mint (i.e. the keyword search data is is not cross-referenced into the session trail). Statcounter also seems to do a better job of reverse DNS lookup to convert numeric IP numbers to their domain names without making you wait; they probably cache the DNS information. While Mint CAN do the reverse lookup with the XXX Strong Mint plugin, it takes a lot of time and you will have to wait many seconds for each lookup to complete, not to mention that this may bog down your server if you have a large log; this is not the sort of thing you would want to do on a shared server.

• Google Analytics feels to me like a hybrid Web 2.0 application, and at first glance provides TONS of useful information and pretty graphs. It has a neat graphical overlay of popular clicks and their position on the page, neat mapping capabilities, flexible date range-based statistical sorting, and a full complement of export capabilities. It also integrates with your AdWords campaigns and gives you all the information you need to track the performance of your content. However, for my needs I don't find it particularly fun to use because the information I need is buried under layers of menus. I can't track session trails through the site in the way I'd like to. It takes several clicks through several menus to get the referrer, keyword search, and popularity results, and I can never remember which is which. Factor in its lag time in updating, and the experience is less than satisfying. With Mint, I can get the big picture of what's going on with my web traffic all on one page. With Google Analytics, I've got to dig through a lot of reports. Plus, Mint just looks better.

In short, Mint does a great job of giving me the information I need to see trends. Statcounter does a better job of showing how people (anonymously, I should mention) are spending their time exploring the site over a period of time. Google Analytics does a lot of that too, but requires too much clicking and page refreshing to build the same picture, with less detail than either Statcounter or Mint. Perhaps all this clicking and raw data is the nature of "web analytics", and I just don't get it.

So Mint is Back Online. Long live Mint!

I'm sure there are tons of other tracking services that I could look into, but these are the three I have the most experience with. For inexpensive, realtime tracking of web traffic, I've found that I needed Mint back. While I had it uninstalled, I found myself going back to Statcounter every 30 minutes to get that "big picture", because Google Analytics just wasn't updating fast enough AND it's cumbersome to get at the stats that I care most about:

• Current traffic levels by the hour and day
• What's popular
• Where links are coming from
• What's being downloaded
• What outgoing links are being clicked

With Google Analytics, getting that information (if it's even available) takes 8-10 clicks in nested menus. With Mint, it's just a matter of visiting the page and looking at it. If I was running actual web marketing campaigns on my site, I'm sure Google Analytics would be far more useful, but as that's not the case it's not for me. If I had the money I would use Statcounter because I like its drill-down features.

Screenshots: Mint

Here's what the Preferences screen looks like. It's all yummy DHTML / AJAX / Web 2.0. Very pretty and functional (in FireFox, anyway).

And here's my main Mint screen. Additional peppers installed (aka plugins): Outclicks, DLoads, Trends, Notification (this sends me an email if some interesting event occurs, like more pageloads in an hour than is normal), SessionTracker, and Sparks.

I should note that I have been tracking data for less than a day, so there aren't a whole lot of stats to look at. But you get the idea.

Another note: I recently dropped DLoads because this was apparently the cause of the massive server spikes that got me kicked off my old server...I think DLoad's method of reading files into PHP to buffer files caused much memory overusage. I switched to Steve Smith's Download Counter as an alternative.

Dave's Assessment: This is a good middle ground between the nutty data overload that is Google Analytics, and the more intimate tracking provided by StatCounter.

» Link to Mint home page. And a bonus link to digital renaissance man Shaun Inman, the creator of Mint.

Screenshots: Google Analytics

Google Analytics is capable of displaying a lot of interesting data and reporting, but it's just overkill for me. There is so much reporting that I've just hilighted a few of the features here:

Here's the main "executive summary" screen for Google Analytics, when you first log-in. Note that there isn't any data for today yet in the system (it's already 830AM here).

The top content on my site, apparently. I had to hunt-and-click through the menus on the left to get here.

The always-interesting "So how did people get to my site?" referring sources page.

I've never seen this page before, but it looks interesting.

Dave's assessment: Should I ever run a web marketing campaign and needed to learn how to use all this data, I would look at this again.

» Link to the Google Analytics home page.

Screenshots: StatCounter

The very Web 1.0 main page of StatCounter. Very straightforward. Since I've been using StatCounter from the time I started blogging, I can see the traffic plotted all the way back by adjusting the date range. It's a pain in the ass to do that in Google Analytics (and it doesn't seem to save data for more than a few months anyway).

I drilled down into the hits for the root page of "davidseah.com". Since I only have 100 hits logged, and am getting about 200-300 hits per hour, I don't see much detailed information. Here you can see, though, that there's one user who has returned 33 times. And he/she uses a Mac! :-)

This is a different user than the one above, but you can get an idea of what StatCounter allows you to do by drilling further down into the stats. You can actually see what a specific user is doing, and where they're coming from.

You may not know their name, but StatCounter is able to trace the browsing habits of a specific user over time, IF you have enough historical data stored in the databases. That comes back down to how many log entries you're paying for. If I 25,000 log entries ($29/month), I'd be able to see quite a bit more history and build a better picture of what people are really doing.

BTW, the blurred-out data in the screenshots is just the IP address and reverse-lookup. It's some cable modem network in the Netherlands. StatCounter doesn't give you the magical ability to look up personal names.

Dave's assessment: StatCounter allows you to track the browsing patterns of individual users easily, which is something that Mint and Google Analytics can't touch. If I was trying to understand the psychology of my visitors to build some kind of mental image of my core audience, I might use something like this. If this kind of tracking bothers you, you might consider blocking cookies from these sites.

» Link to the StatCounter home page.

3 WEEKS LATER...

It's January 4th, and today I was LifeHackered, which took down my site. The helpful folks at my hosting company (FutureQuest) narrowed down the issue to Mint, which was causing server load spikes in excess of 100+. After they disabled it, loads dropped down back to normal.

I thought about this for a bit, and thought that since Mint peppers don't share data, they might be invoking a LOT of extra database and CPU activity for every page load. And they might be doing it inefficiently. I uploaded another instance of Mint (the old one was locked out) and used that to change the configuration to unload everything except the default pepper. Then I asked FutureQuest to re-enable it, which they did cautiously. Since then the load apparently has been OK (Mint hasn't been taken offline again)...2693 page loads in the last hour, and the load has averaged between 1.5 and 3.5. Not great, but not terrible.

Still, this brings up some high traffic considerations when using Mint on a shared server:

• Beware of Peppers. They may cause excess CPU utilization, and get you kicked off your shared server when you experience even moderately-high traffic. And yes, I am already cacheing. I see that there's a benchmark flag built into Mint since 1.24, which might be helpful in tracking down which Peppers are the culprit. However, I'm not sure if it benchmarks the actual ping on each pageload. The default installation by itself seems to work fine.

• The Fresh Look is Fleeting. Mint is designed to give you an at-a-glance sense of what's going on with your website. When you get a lot of traffic, that freshness is harder to catch. I spend a lot of time looking at unique referrers, and when they're ALL unique and happening several times a minute, you quickly lose 'em. This is probably when using a regular log analysis tool would make more sense, especially if it can tell you WHEN certain pages became popular.