I’m going to assume that readers are more than familiar with the basics of web analytics, and the point of this piece is not necessarily to educate in this regard but rather to encourage that we do as much as we can to help clarify the situation. Each time I work with a new client I make a specific point of talking them through analytics and explicitly defining the difference between hits, visits (uniques & recurring) and views.

Without fail, each one has mentioned that they had misunderstood the term ‘hits’ and were glad to be informed (although often a little disappointed) that they should ignore it as a representation of a site’s popularity.

A Quick Recap

A a hit is a request received by a web server for a single file. Thus, a page load may result in a number of hits, for example: one for the page itself, another for the stylesheet, another for a JavaScript file and a further hit for each image. See the Wikipedia web analytics article for a more in-depth look at the key definitions.

Why is it important to make the distinction between a hit and a page view? The problem is that the figure represented in the monthly hit count for a site really has no bearing on the number of page views and visits. Of course, there’s a linear relationship between page views and hits, assuming that each page has a similar number of hits per view (which often shouldn’t be the case if client-side caching is on and has been correctly configured).

Counting Hits

If a page has for example 20 external resources to be loaded, one view will of course generate 20 hits. Another page may have only 5 resources and so 5 hits are generated per view. This clearly indicates a huge discrepancy if a sole reliance on hits is used for judging the popularity of the page. The figure could naturally be far more extreme.

Help Your Clients Understand

So I’d like to encourage everyone to, at the very least, insist on making the above distinctions clear with their clients. Hopefully this will help clear up the confusion to some extent.

It’s widely understood that languages don’t scale, but how should you choose your stack, caching techniques, hardware (or whether to go virtual or cloud), monitoring tools and backup solutions? How should the database be structured and in what way will code upgrades / bug fixes / features be rolled out?

Highscalability.com covers this broad range of topics and, helpfully, has plenty of real-world examples. Ever wondered how Facebook deals with a staggering 2.7 million photo uploads every 20 minutes, or how Stack Overflow holds up with only a handful of servers and many million uniques a month? Here are a few links to some detailed rundowns:

• Facebook – Facebook in 20 Minutes: 2.7M Photos, 10.2M Comments, 4.6M Messages
• Netflix – Continually Test by Failing Servers with Chaos Monkey
• The Onion – Caching 404s Saved the Onion 66% on Server Time
• Squarespace – A Grid Handles Hundreds of Millions of Requests a Month
• Stack Overflow – Architecture

Salesforce have always been very open about their force.com architecture; if you’re building an app requiring multi tenancy, their white paper and webcast covering their platform are well worth a look. As ever, Stack Overflow has plenty of interesting discussions, so be sure to read through the questions tagged ‘scalability’.

I’d love to hear your recommended scalability resources, so do please post them in the comments!

There’s no need to take time away from the office and you can re-watch the conference recording as many times as you like after the event. Sign up now on the Think Vitamin Online Conferences site.

Want access to more online conferences at a great discount? Sign up to Think Vitamin Membership and you’ll get access to a set number of conferences and save money. If you’re already a member, you can select to attend the conference as part of your package.

• Even Faster Web Sites – Steve Souders
• Backend Performance – Chris Lea
• Using nginx as a Reverse Proxy – Chris Lea
• NoSQL Databases – Mike Malone

It’ll be kicking off at 9am Pacific / 5pm GMT on Thursday 16 December, so go ahead and grab your tickets now! There’s no need to take time away from the office and you can re-watch the conference recording as many times as you like after the event.

• Design Workflow – Brian Fling
• iPhone UI Decisions & iOS Gotchas – Sarah Parmenter
• App Usability – Brian Fling
• Preparing Your App for the Store – Malcolm Barclay

It’ll be kicking off at 9am Pacific / 5pm GMT on Tuesday 30 November, so go ahead and grab your tickets now! There’s no need to take time away from the office and you can re-watch the conference recording as many times as you like after the event.

We’ll be covering topics such as Design Workflow, App Usability, iPhone UI Decisions & iOS Gotchas & Preparing Your App for the Store.

It’ll be kicking off at 9am Pacific / 5pm GMT, so go ahead and grab your tickets now!

There’s no need to take time away from the office and you can re-watch the conference recording as many times as you like after the event.

Want access to more online conferences at a great discount? Sign up to Think Vitamin Membership and you’ll get access to a set number of conferences and save money. If you’re already a member, you can select to attend the conference as part of your package.

• Design Workflow – You’re already a web designer and have your preferred methods, techniques and tools. We’ll discuss how to modify and develop these to suit the requirements for iOS platform designs along with how to plan your app’s interface.
• App Usability – Taking existing apps as examples, we’ll look in detail at to what design patters exist on the platform and how form follows function throughout the various categories of apps available.
• iPhone UI Decisions & iOS Gotchas – This session will discuss the nuances of designing for a touch screen device along with how to maintain the trademark Apple ‘look and feel’ to your apps whilst staying creative and original. We’ll cover plenty of hints and tips such as optimum sizing of UI elements and colour palettes.
• Preparing Your App for the Store – We’ll cover all of the essential considerations in preparation for submitting your app, such as the icon, Apple’s app guidelines and regulations, to how to charge and how to maintain and update your app once it’s in the store.

It’ll be kicking off at 9am Pacific on Tuesday 30 November, so go ahead and grab your tickets now!

We’ll be covering topics such as ‘The Bright Future of Web Typography‘, ‘Better Typography & Setting a Grid‘ and ‘Communicating with Type‘ and the speakers will be answering your questions live in their individual Q&A sessions.

There’s no need to take time away from the office and you can re-watch the conference recording as many times as you like after the event. Sign up now on the Think Vitamin Online Conferences site.

Want access to more online conferences at a great discount? Sign up to Think Vitamin Membership and you’ll get access to a set number of conferences and save money. If you’re already a member, you can select to attend the conference as part of your package.

There are a whole host of available commands and bundles, but what if you need to extend existing ones or create your own? I’ll cover some of the basics which will help you get started…

For this example, I’m going to perform a simple append to end-of-line (EOL) operation on selected text using sed.

Using Filter Through Command

Textmate’s ‘Filter Through Command…’  (under Text) is our first port of call. This will allow us to send input data from Textmate to a command and then return the command’s output to the current document.

sed 's/$/,/'


We now end up with a comma at the end of each line of the selected text. The comma can of course be replaced with any string.

Re-using Commands

Textmate’s strength however lies in its bundles; essentially containers for re-usable blocks of code, templates and snippets. Rather than having to use the ‘Filter Through Command’ feature each time, we can replicate its behaviour in a stored command. We can also extend the original sed command by taking the content of the clipboard and appending this to the end of each selected line.

Under ‘Bundles > Bundle Editor > Show Bundle Editor’ we create a new command within the Text bundle.

#!/bin/bash
if [[ $(pbpaste|wc -l) -eq 0 ]]
then r=`pbpaste`
sed "s/$/$r/"
else sed "s/$/,/"
fi


The second line of our new command checks whether we have more than one line of data in the clipboard, if so we’ll default to simply appending a comma to the end of the selected lines (line 5). If the clipboard contains no more than one line, its contents are assigned to $r and placed into the sed command.

The input is ‘Selected Text’ or ‘Nothing’ and the output is ‘Replace Selected Text’. The command can be run by going to ‘Bundles > Text > Name of command’. We can also bind this command to a keyboard shortcut if we so wish.

Adding simple UI elements

As a final example, we can extend this command further by introducing a dialog box which prompts for the input of the string to be appended, rather than relying on the clipboard.

Create a new command under the Text bundle with the same input and output settings as above, enter the following as the command:

#!/bin/bash
r=$(CocoaDialog inputbox --title "String to be appended to EOL" \
--informative-text "Enter string:" \
--button1 "Okay" --button2 "Cancel")
[[ $(head -n1 <<<"$r") == "2" ]] && exit_discard
r=$(tail -n1 <<<"$r")
sed "s/$/$r/"


A CocoaDialog input box is called and we create two buttons, ‘Cancel’ and ‘Okay’, along with some assistive text. The dialog will return two lines of text:

1. the button pressed (numeric)
2. the string entered into the input

On line 6, we perform a check to see whether the ‘Cancel’ button was clicked (button number 2). If so we can exit, otherwise we retrieve the content of the second line returned by the dialog, assign this to $r and place it into our sed command.

Hopefully you’ll be inspired to modify and extend the examples for your own use. Please feel free to post these in the comments!