Tag Archives: stats

Looking back at 2013

Published Jan 25, 2014 | In Random/Personal

Another year just ended and it’s time for publishing my year end review like the ones I did for the previous few years.

Personal Highlights

2013 was a milestone year for me in the personal front. I spawned a new process 😉 (Translation for those who didn’t get it: I became a dad).

Like all parents know, this is the most rewarding as well as the most demanding experience. Luckily, my little one has kind of gotten into a proper sleeping schedule these days and so my (and my wife) zombie days are in the past.

This would explain why I was kind of out of action (less blog posts, not much public speaking etc) in the last few months. Hopefully, I should be back to action in 2014.

Open source contribution

Back in the early days of 2013, I decided to do at least one contribution per day to open source projects. I was able to maintain this streak for more than 4 months (124 days to be exact). A look at my github profile, should explain everything 🙂

I also took over the Arduino Makefile project and worked hard to steadily increase its popularity. Right now it has around 250 stars and close to 100 forks in Github.

I also moved most of my WordPress plugins to github. This also increase the popularity of my WordPress plugins and also user contributions.

Reading

Towards the end of the year, I decided to take a reading break and this helped me to complete around 10 novels from Isaac Asimov’s famous Foundation Series.

Blog Stats

I used my Year End stats WordPress plugin to generate the following stats.

2013-no-posts2013-no-comments2013-total-post-length 2013-avg-post-length

The total number of posts that I have written in 2013 has increase a little bit and I am happy about it.

I am planning to write a little more in 2014 as well. Hopefully my little one allows me to do so 😉

What’s in for 2014?

I am definitely planning to spend quality time with my family, especially the little one 🙂 As most parents know, the first few years of a kid are the most rewarding ones and I don’t want to miss out on it.

Assuming that I will have time after that, I want to do the following as well.

Books

I definitely want to complete the Foundation Series that I started. I still have another 5 books to complete.

After that I am planning to read favorite person Chris Hadfield’s Autobiography: An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. I already have the book, I am just waiting to finish Foundation Series.

Also, if you have recommendation, please let me know. I am planning to read at least a dozen books this year.

Learn R

I am also planning to concentrate a little bit more on Statistic and Machine Learning and as part of it, I am planning to learn R. I am also planning to see if I compete on some competitions in Kaggle. I might also start writing about more about Machine Learning this year. So stay tuned 🙂

Hardwarefun

Regarding hardware stuff, I am planning expand HardwareFun.com and write more posts there and also continue working on Arduino and start playing around with Raspberry Pi as well. So it is going to be pretty exciting.

From the looks of it, 2014 seems to be an exciting as well as a busy year and I am really looking forward to it.

So how was your 2013?

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Looking back at 2012

Published Jan 6, 2013 | In Random/Personal

2012 had been a great year and it just ended. I thought of publishing my year end review for 2012 as I have done for the previous years.

Personal Highlights

If you have read my year end review of 2011, then you would have know that I got engaged in 2011 and I got married in 2012. Before marriage, pretty much everyone were saying that my life is going to change completely, but fortunately for me things haven’t changed much except that I have another person in my life who cares for me more than I care for myself 😉

Talking of marriage, I am very happy to know lot of people really liked my wedding invitation and recently a couple contacted me from Indonesia asking if they can use my wedding invitation design for their marriage.

Travel Highlights

Another thing which most people predicted for me is that after marriage I will not get much time to travel, which again proved to be wrong 😉 I continued my tradition of at least one international travel and a couple of domestic travel.

HardwareFun

2012 had been a great year for me from the hardware and robotics perspective. I continued working on hardware and Arduino related stuff which I picked up in 2010.

One of the important things regarding hardware that I did in 2012 is that I launched hardwarefun.com one of my pet projects that is close to me. I created hardwarefun.com to document my different adventures with hardware and also help other people who also want to learn hardware programming.

Talks and Workshops

Another thing which I improved in 2012 is my public speaking skills. I gave around 15 talks and also conducted my robotics workshop. The following are some of my favorite talks.

You can see the complete list of talks that I have given so far from my talks page.

Blog Stats

The following are stats generated for this blog by my Year End Stats WordPress Plugin.

Number of posts by year Number of comments by year Average length of posts by year Length of all posts by year

The number of posts have increased a bit and I am happy about that, since I am also writing posts in at hardwarefun as well.

I am planning to write more posts in 2013 and hope that with talks, workshop and personal life I get some free time to keep up this word 😉

What’s in for 2013?

So what’s in for 2013?

I am planning to concentrate more on my WordPress Plugins a bit and I already have some pretty good ideas. So stay tuned 😉

Regarding hardware stuff, I am planning expand HardwareFun.com and write more posts there and also continue working on Arduino and start playing around with Raspberry Pi as well. So it is going to be pretty exciting.

Regarding talks and workshop, I am planning to continue my robotics workshop (the next batch is going to be at the end of this month) and also start giving talks and workshops on other areas as well. Planning for a Hadoop and Pig workshop/talk soon.

From the looks of it, 2013 seems to be an exciting as well as a busy year and I am really looking forward to it.

So how was your 2012?

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Looking back at 2011

Published Jan 15, 2012 | In Random/Personal

2011 had been a great year and it just ended. I thought of publishing my year end review for 2011 as I did for the previous years.

Personal Highlight

Finally..

Well do I have to explain anything more? 😉

For those who are still staring at the picture, yes I am “formally” engaged now 🙂 My marriage is going to be on Feb 6th 2012 (Just another 21 days to go)

Other highlights in 2011

Apart from the big personal update the following are some of the other highlights of 2011.

I started of the year by changing the permalink of my blog, had a most memorable day on top of a hill, released my first Arduino library, met my idol Doug for the first time in person, went to a couple of HackU events, released my gist-it WordPress Plugin, bought an interesting toy, created my pet bot Asimi, gave a couple of talks and finally experienced snowfall for the first time in my life.

Travel highlights

On the travel front I had a pretty good year. Following are some of my travel highlights

Blog Stats

The following are my blog stats generated by my Year End stats WordPress Plugin.

no-of-posts-2011 no-of-comments-2011

avg-length-of-posts-2011 total-no-chars

At the starting of 2011, I wanted to increase the average size of the blog post that I write and I have succeeded in that.

But, when compared with the previous years, I have written fewer posts. Getting committed, travelling places and what else you can expect 😉

With me getting married in 2012 I am not sure how much free time I will get, but I will definitely try my best to increase the count in 2012.

What’s in the card for 2012?

I am planning to spend more time on Android and Arduino stuff and also planning to enhance my pet bot Asimi. So expect some news about some cool projects. 😉

Well, from the personal front, I am going to get married in 2012. Not sure what to expect out of it, but I am eagerly waiting for it. It’s kind of really exciting to realize that you have finally found someone with whom you are going to spend the rest of your life. 🙂

So how was 2011 for you?

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Looking back at 2010

Published Jan 23, 2011 | In Random/Personal

2011 started off as a busy year for me and so I was not able to publish my year end review post for 2010 on time. Finally I have got some free time and without much delay, here is my year end stats and review post for 2010, which just ended.

Highlights of 2010

2010 has been an eventful year. I started giving talks regularly in local meetup groups, started having crush on CouchDB and then on Arduino, learned a lot of stuff about Android and even released my first app to the Android market, released a couple of WordPress Plugins and themes, together with a couple of RoloPress releases, created my first jQuery Plugin, consolidated all my code to github, bought a new bike and travelled a lot.

Time for some stats now 🙂

Number of Posts

no-posts-per-year

When compared with 2009, the total number of posts has gone. One important reason for this is that, I have been spending more time on stuff like Android and Arduino rather than writing posts. Hopefully this year, I will get some free time so that I can start writing more posts like 2009.

Number of Comments

no-comments-per-year

Like the number of posts, the number of comments has also gone a little low. Hopefully this year as I start to write more posts, the number of comments should go up.

Average number of characters per post

avg-length-posts

The average length of posts as stayed the same when compared with 2009. I am planning to maintain the same for this year too.

total-length-of-posts

Again, because of the less number of posts, the total characters that I have written in 2010 has gone down. 🙁 Hopefully this should go up in 2011

What’s in for this year

This year I am planning to concentrate more on Scala, Android and physical computing using Arduino. So expect some cool and fun projects this year. 🙂 Also I am planning to travel a lot this year, so keep a watch on my Flickr stream as well.

<shameless self promotion>I have created these wonderful graphs using my year end stats WordPress Plugin. If you run a WordPress blog then you can also generate these graphs by downloading my year end stats WordPress Plugin.</shameless self promotion>

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Look back – 2009

Published Jan 18, 2010 | In Random/Personal

Well, without much delay (just 18 days compared with last year’s 56 days 😉 ), here is my year end stats and review post for the year 2009.

Highlights of 2009

2009 has been a year of rollercoaster for me and a year full of changes both at the personal side as well as professional side.

I started the year with a trip to the operation theatre 🙂 and then to Bangalore for attending Yahoo hack day, started having a crush on Google Wave, then changed job and moved to Bangalore and then changed my host 😉 , participated in WordPress Plugin competition and then released a couple of Plugins (for which I got an excellent review from Ozh), and then had a break-up with TV (which turned out to be a very good thing) and then visited US on a business trip and then finally ended the year, by releasing RoloPress. 😉

Okay enough of self-bragging and time for some stats. 🙂

Number of Posts

total number of posts by year

Thanks to my break-up with TV, I got more time to spend with my blog, which can be seen from the increase in the total number of posts. The number of posts slowed down a bit towards the end of the year due to my travel and RoloPress, but on the whole, I am happy with the results 🙂

Number of comments

total number of comments by year

More than the number of posts, the one which gave me more satisfaction, is the number of comments. Last year, I said that I will try to engage more user activity in my blog and one look at the graph should say that I succeeded. 😉

Thanks to all those who commented, you really bought a smile on my face. 🙂

Average number of characters in posts

average length of posts by year

There is a slight increase when compared with the previous years and since things have worked out well so far, I am planning to continue the same this year too.

Total number of characters in all posts

total length of all posts by year

I have almost written (okay typed 😉 ) almost double the amount of characters in 2009 when compared with 2008. This is really good and I hope to continue the same next year too. 🙂

What’s in for this year?

So for this year, I am planning to concentrate more on my WordPress Plugins and RoloPress and also planning to learn a couple of languages like Haskel, Scala and R. Let’s see how things turn out 🙂

<shameless self promotion>I have created these wonderful graphs using my year end stats WordPress Plugin. If you run a WordPress blog then you can also generate these graphs by downloading my year end stats WordPress Plugin.</shameless self promotion>

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Updated FeedBurner stats Google Gadget

Published Jun 11, 2009 | In API's/Mashup

I have updated my FeedBurner stats Google Gadget, to change the API endpoint to feedburner.google.com. If you have already added the gadget to iGoogle or have embedded it in your web pages, the changes will apply automatically and you don’t need to change anything.

The Gadget ceased to work after Google changed the API endpoint and it should continue to work after this change.

The full source code of this gadget is available here and if you are interested you can add it to your Google personalised page by clicking this button. Add to Google

Let me know if you still face any issues with the Gadget.

Posted in API's/Mashup | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Year End Stats for 2008

Published Feb 26, 2009 | In Random/Personal

Well guys, I just realized that I didn’t publish my year end stats for 2008, like how I did for 2007. So without much dealy (just after two months 😉 ), here is my year end stats for 2008.

Number of posts

number-of-posts

When number of posts is concerned, you could see that when compared with 2007, I have improved. Thanks to the pledge that I took in 2008, the number of posts has increased. This is one area where I should improve a lot more. So guys expect more mosts in 2009 😉

Number of comments

number-of-comments

When compared with 2007, the number of comments has increased slightly. It was 220 in 2007 and in 2008 it is 267. But it does not include the comments I get in Twitter or FriendFeed. (I should find some way to include them too). I should also start engaging the readers more. So my dear readers, start talking more and you could make me happy 😉

Average number of characters in posts

avg-length-of-posts

For the past three years I am pretty much consistent in the length of my blog posts, which is around 2000 characters per post. This suits the style of my posts and I guess I will stick with this for 2009 too.

Total number of characters in posts

total-length-of-posts

This represents the total number of characters that I have typed in this blog(except those removed by backspace 😉 ). Compared with 2007, I have typed more. If I succeed in my aim to write more posts in 2009, with still keeping the average length consistent, then in 2009 I will type more. Let’s see what I achieve at the end of 2009. 🙂

And this sums up my year end stats for 2008. In a nutshell, I want to

  • Write more posts
  • Engage users more
  • Keep the average lenght of posts consistent.

Let’s see how I keep it up in 2009. 🙂

<shameless self promotion>I have created these wonderful graphs using my year end stats WordPress Plugin. If you run a WordPress blog then you can also generate these graphs by downloading my year end stats WordPress Plugin.</shameless self promotion>

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Integrate Open Flash Chart libraries with your WordPress Plugin

Published Dec 28, 2008 | In Plugin Releases

Open Flash Chart is an excellent Flash-based, open source charting component which can be used to create high-quality charts with ease. The advantage of using flash is that you can create professional quality charts with minimum effort, but the only disadvantage is that the user viewing the charts needs to have Adobe Flash Plugin installed in his browser.

It is released under open source and you are free to modify it if you know Flash and Action Script. If you are planning to start, then it has excellent tutorials and a huge array of libraries. Both Akismet stats and WordPress stats Plugin use this for displaying data in charts.

I was playing with Open Flash Chart, sometime ago and decided to use it for my Year End Stats WordPress Plugin. Instead of just including the required files with the Plugin, I separated them out into a separate WordPress Plugin so that it can be shared by other Plugins as well.

You can download the Plugin file from my Plugin page and then upload it to your wp-contents directory.

If you are a WordPress Plugin developer, then you can check my Year End Stats Plugin to find out how to integrate Open Flash Chart in your WordPress Plugin.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Rotating Apache log files using Cronolog

Published Mar 9, 2008 | In Unix/Server Stuff

I must confess that I am a stats freak. If you are a long time reader of my blog, then you would have known that by now yourself. 😉 This explains the reason why I want to preserve my Apache log files in spite of using a variety of stat services like Google Analytics, WordPress stats, statscounter, performancing metrics (before it was closed).

The default Apache configuration preserves the log files only for the last 10 days, but I wanted to permanently archive this files. After some searches in Google I came across an excellent program called Cronolog. Cronolog is a simple filter program which writes each log entry to a separate log file named after the filename format specified. You can use a variety of parameters like current date, time etc to define the filename template.

First we have to install cronolog, either by using aptitude or by downloading it from its download page. Then you have to change the log file name path in the virtual host file. (In Ubuntu Gusty, the virtual host files are situated in the path /etc/apache2/sites-enabled). I am using the following file format for this blog
# Custom log file locations
LogLevel warn
ErrorLog "|/usr/sbin/cronolog /path/to/logs/%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-sudarmuthu.com-error.log"
CustomLog "|/usr/sbin/cronolog /path/to/logs/%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-sudarmuthu.com-access.log" combined

which will store my log files in separate folders for each year and for each month, like the below hierarchy
/2007/12/2007-11-01-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
/2007/12/2007-11-02-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
......
/2008/01/2008-01-01-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
/2008/01/2008-01-02-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
......

You can use a variety of modifiers for the filename and I have documented some of them in the below table. You can get more information from its documentation.

Specifier Description
Time fields
%H hour (00..23)
%I hour (01..12)
%p the locale’s AM or PM indicator
%M minute (00..59)
%S second (00..61, which allows for leap seconds)
%X the locale’s time representation (e.g.: “15:12:47”)
%Z time zone (e.g. GMT), or nothing if the time zone cannot be determined
Date fields
%a the locale’s abbreviated weekday name (e.g.: Sun..Sat)
%A the locale’s full weekday name (e.g.: Sunday .. Saturday)
%b the locale’s abbreviated month name (e.g.: Jan .. Dec)
%B the locale’s full month name, (e.g.: January .. December)
%c the locale’s date and time (e.g.: "Sun Dec 15 14:12:47 GMT 1996")
%d day of month (01 .. 31)
%j day of year (001 .. 366)
%m month (01 .. 12)
%U week of the year with Sunday as first day of week (00..53, where week 1 is the week containing the first Sunday of the year)
%W week of the year with Monday as first day of week (00..53, where week 1 is the week containing the first Monday of the year)
%w day of week (0 .. 6, where 0 corresponds to Sunday)
%x locale’s date representation (e.g. today in Britain: “15/12/96”)
%y year without the century (00 .. 99)
%Y year with the century (1970 .. 2038)

Posted in Unix/Server Stuff | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Google Gadget to keep track of your FeedBurner stats

Published Feb 17, 2008 | In API's/Mashup

FeedBurner Stats Google GadgetI had some free time this weekend and I used it to create my second Google Gadget called called FeedBurner stats. (By the way my first gadget was Bloglines Notifier, which notifies the count of unread items in your Bloglines account). It uses FeedBurner Awareness API to fetch the subscriber count of your FeedBurner feed and displays it using Google Charts API.

The full source code of this gadget is available here and if you are interested you can add it to your Google personalised page by clicking this button. Add to Google

After you add the gadget, you just need to enter your FeedBurner feed URL. The gadget will fetch the subscriber count for the past one week and will display it in a nice bar graph using Google Charts API.

API’s used

The following are the API’s used for creating this gadget

Posted in API's/Mashup | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments