Case: Lots of Flickr traffic

One of my photos, the Empire State Pigeon (also shown to the right), was recently featured in the official Flickr Blog. The Flickr Blog has the property that it is featured on the main page of Flickr, at least for the logged in users. Now, as Flickr is a high traffic site, anything on the front page is likely to get high traffic too, and so did my photo.

I posted the photo to Flickr about 19 months ago. In that time it had gathered some 5000 views, which I found an impressive number. However, when the blog post was published, the view count surged all the way up to 30000 in just a few days! Below is the graph that shows the daily traffic statistics before, during and after the event. Click to zoom to the full size view:

The graph shows that the photo was getting a steady amount of some thirty views a day and then, on April 14, it suddenly got 11133 views, 106 comments and 468 favorites. The next day it got even more views, 12635, but way less comments (8) and favorites (40). Why?

Well, that can be explained by drilling into the referrer statistics: on April 14, only 4784 of the 11000 visitors came through Flickr.com. Almost as many, 4594, came from another high traffic site called Reddit.com to where someone had posted a link to the photo. On April 15, 9798 visitors came via Reddit and only 517 via Flickr, as by then the Flickr Blog already had new posts. Reddit users don't necessarily have Flickr accounts and thus cannot leave comments or favorite the photos.

Another difference I observed in the behavior of Flickr visitors and Reddit visitors was that Flickr visitors looked at my other photos too. Thus the aggregate views over all of my photos was a lot higher on April 14 than it was on April 15, even though that one photo got more visitors on April 15:

(And now for something completely different. If those graphs above felt dry, try the GraphJam site instead!)

Tools for web developers

A handy tool for web developers is Dynamic Drive's Gradient Image Maker. Creating gradient images is a basic thing that a web developer has to do and there's no need to fire up Photoshop for something like that. Microsoft Paint can be used to create gradients, too, but a dedicated tool beats that hands down. :)

Another nifty tool, possibly for selecting the colors for your gradient, is Iconico's ColorPic. It can be used to pick a color anywhere from your screen. It's got an adjustable magnifier, you can nudge the mouse cursor pixel by pixel using the arrow keys, and you can select the average color of a small area of pixels in case selecting the color of a single pixel is not desired!

Firefox Personas

The newest version of the Firefox browser, 3.6, offers a new, nifty little feature called Personas. A Persona is like a skin that Firefox can wear. Personas only change the background and not, for example, the buttons. On the Firefox Personas site you can try the personas by just hovering your mouse cursor over the Persona image and take it into use by clicking "Wear It". It couldn't be any simpler! There are already thousands of Personas from which to choose. I am using different Personas on different computers. So far they are these:

• Niagra Falls by Lee.Tom
• Yosemite by Lee.Tom
• Mozilla Sky by sanideos
• Sunset Over Water by MaDonna
  

Opera 10.51 RC1

A month ago I wrote about Opera 10.50 beta. Now the 10.50 has already passed the beta stage and what's more, Opera 10.51 Release Candidate 1 for Windows has just been released. This version contains performance improvements and an even better JavaScript engine, especially what comes to memory management. These features are of course very welcome to all netbook users. :)

Image processing software

When you open an image file in Windows 7 it opens in Windows Photo Viewer by default. It can be used to view and rotate images but nothing else, so you need a better piece of software if you intend to crop, resize, adjust or otherwise edit your photos.

IrfanView does all this. It is a piece of freeware that I have used for as long as I have used the Opera browser and the NoteTab text editor, ten years or so. The user interface is minimalistic and the program is controlled using the menus or the shortcut keys. IrfanView can be used to batch process an entire folder full of images or just one image at a time. It can read dozens of file formats and write an impressive number of formats too. There are also lots of plugins for it bringing in some extra functionality. They are really easy to install because they are provided as one big installer file from the IrfanView homepage. What's also very important for netbook users is that IrfanView is a lightweight and fast program.

Hint: If you work with images that have transparency, set the IrfanView background color to pink (Options | Properties/Settings... | Viewing | Main window color). Then you will know exactly where the transparency starts and where it ends, as pink is featured in really few pictures, unlike black and white.

Text editors

So far I have introduced you to alternative office software, browsers, instant messaging software and PDF readers. Today it's text editors meant for plain text.

So, Windows ships with Notepad. It's as simple as a text editor can get. A good text editor can save you time by having useful shortcuts, being able to have several files open at once, allowing you to do search and replace on several files at once, allowing you to use regular expressions when searching and replacing, etc.

All this and much more can be done using NoteTab Pro. It costs $29.95 but is well worth every penny. There is also a free version called NoteTab Light which is a very capable program too -- a comparison of features between the different versions can be found here.

I myself have been an avid NoteTab user for years already, not least because it has got its own scripting language which can be used to program the application to do almost anything you can think of. Automatic reformatting of any text you just copied to clipboard from another program? Consider it done. HTML table wizard? Piece of cake. FTP integration? No problem. The scripts are called clips and organized into clipbooks. The program comes with many ready made clipbooks and more can be downloaded.

NoteTab has also got a very active and helpful community at the Yahoo! Groups. It is divided into a general section, clips, and www-authoring.

The only thing that NoteTab lacks is syntax highlighting for other languages than HTML. If you need that, I can warmly recommend an open source program called SciTE.

Alternative PDF readers

Previously I have written about alternatives to Internet Explorer and alternatives to Windows Messenger. This time it's alternatives to the Adobe Reader.

Foxit Reader is a small and fast PDF reader. It is commercial software but the basic version is free and has all the main features and, in some aspeceven more than Adobe Reader has.

Sumatra PDF is another slim and quick reader. It is designed so that it does not require any special installation procedures and can be used from a USB stick. It is also open source, if that's what you prefer.

Both of these are good alternatives to the Adobe Reader, so it's a personal choice between them. Either one works faster than the Adobe Reader, and the software that you are using on your netbook can never be too fast.