Wordle – Clever Java Tag Clouds

Lovely lovely words. Wordle is a java app developed by a guy from IBM. It generates “word clouds” from a sample of text you provide or generates it dynamically from your blog URL (with an RSS feed) or del.icio.us user name. Above is the the cloud from this blog. Ten points for spotting Climatron in there.

This post was written by Gareth on August 26, 2008 at 10:01 am

Tracking with Google Analytics from Flash

Just a quick update on the Google Analytics work I have been doing in-amongst writing a desktop application to detect proxy settings (maybe more on that later)…

I have completed the move from development to live server and have implemented some code for Flash banners to call the Google Analytics JavaScript _trackPage function. Its really simple stuff but as I have done 2 examples (one in Actionscript 2 and one in Actionscript 3) for the client to be able to supply the creative departments of advertisers (as they usually create the banners and supply .gif or in this case .swf files) I thought I might as well post the examples. For those people trying to find there way with Actionscript 3, a button click action is now triggered by an Event (MouseEvent.CLICK) and interestingly a call to some JavaScript in the page that embeds the Flash file is now called using the ExternalInterface class (it won’t work with the old method of calling the function from the getURL method). For example:

ExternalInterface.call("pageTracker._trackPageview('/clks/adv/insert-name-here')");

Replaces:

getURL("javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/clks/adv/insert-name-here');");

Anyways, here are the examples for download.

It’s basic but it might help someone

This post was written by Kirsten on August 22, 2008 at 12:52 pm

Climatron, air conditioning unit!

Since Kirsten seems to be firmly in control of our work related posts, I’ll continue to wax lyrical about the weather and temperature in here. After some long drawn out conversations with the management of the building, it was agreed that the hosting company downstairs (there un-ventilated sever room is just below us) was the cause of the tropical climate in here. After admission of blame they have agreed to rent us an air conditioning unit which arrived yesterday *whoops and claps*. Our office has a maximum capacity of 4, at a push, and as you can see from the photo the air con unit (aka Climatron) is an industrial strength behemoth. It has pop up, eyes like kit in Knightrider and quietly hums away in the corner. Safe to say, we are now cool, calm and collected.

This post was written by Gareth on August 1, 2008 at 6:23 pm