8 Ways to Sunday

Urchin, the premiere web analytics company that was recently acquired by Google, has given web hosting company TextDrive the shaft. After TxD’s recent move to a new hosting facility in San Diego, they lost their ability to provide Urchin log analysis to their 5,000 customers. The site license for the software had belonged to The Planet, which had formerly managed TextDrive’s servers.

TextDrive staff have repeatedly tried to contact Urchin since the move and purchase a new site license, but calls have not been returned. They actually can’t convince Urchin to take their money! Meanwhile, all those TextDrive customers have no way to track traffic to their web sites. The response of the TextDrive community has been fascinating to watch. Rather than looking to Urchin’s competition for a solution, they’ve decided to become Urchin’s competition.

The TextDrive user community is rich with tech-savvy designers, coders, usability experts, and professional geeks of all stripes. They’ve banded together to create their own visitor tracking and log analysis program, which will combine the real-time overview of Shaun Inman’s Mint with the in-depth analysis features of Urchin. As fellow TextDrive member Andrew said:

…don’t awake a sleeping giant like the TextDrive community. They’ll have a killer large-scale stats package built on Rails and fully deployed in under six months.

This is the power of a knowledgeable, passionate, and motivated (not to mention pissed-off) community at work. This is why I love being hosted at TextDrive.

(Props: TextDrive Community Forum and Simplicio)

Updates

• 9/19/2005 @ 1:23 AM — Since TextStat was already taken, the name of this program is still up in the air. The temporary code name “Anemone” has been chosen.
• 9/30/2005 @ 8:53 AM — One of the Anemone dev team, giving an update on the project in the TextDrive forums: “It’ll be coming sooner rather than later. It will kick all kinds of ass. It will be both powerful and simple. It will drive its enemies before it, crush them, and hear the lamentations of their women.” Pretty strong words to use against Google, Urchin’s parent company. And you thought Steve Ballmer was harsh.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that a dysfunctional childhood is no excuse for being an asshole.”

“The fastest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it in your pocket.”

A TextDrive forum post I was just reading prompted me to investigate ways to automate certain tasks in Windows. Here’s what I came up with, in case you’d like to try the same thing:

• Batch Files — ComputerHope.com’s guide to automating computer tasks the old-fashioned way, with MS-DOS batch files. It still works like a charm for any program that takes command line arguments, and it’s very easy to learn.
• Windows Scheduled Tasks — Available in the control panel, this built-in Windows tool lets you schedule programs to run at certain times. You can do one-time schedules, or have a task repeat at set intervals. Some programs allow you to set options via Scheduled Tasks, while others can be controlled with command line arguments. This guide will tell you how to make it work.
• Windows Script Host — The successor to batch files, this powerful scripting platform allows you to take control of your computer is unprecedented ways. It takes some programming savvy, but a well-written script can save you tons of time. Unfortunately, WSH has also become a major vector for viruses. If you don’t use it for its intended purpose of program automation, you should probably disable it for security’s sake. If some of your computer’s software refuses to work without WSH, you can also protect yourself with commercial anti-virus tools that include script blocking features (Symantec’s Norton AntiVirus and McAfee VirusScan both do this). If you’d like to see some examples of what WSH can do, check out Microsoft’s script repository.

There are also several third-party tools for system automation. If anyone has a favorite, I’d love to hear about it.

Everything you could ever want to know about my personality, according to a bunch of stupid web quizzes:   (more…)

Achieving good web site accessibility is tough, but the WAT-C is here to help with a slew of tools to make it easier. Their mission:

The Web Accessibility Tools Consortium [WAT-C] provides a collection of free tools to assist both developers and designers in the development and testing of accessible web content. The consortium is a collaboration of some of the world’s leading accessibility practitioners, founded by Accessible Information Solutions (Australia), Infoaxia (Japan), The Paciello Group (USA), Wrong HTML (Japan), and Juicy Studio (UK).

Our goals are to develop new tools, improve current tools and expand the range of browsers, operating systems and languages in which our tools are available.

(Props: guymon)