Category: Web

Google Sesame Video Demo

Sorry for the poor quality. I just wanted to demo this for a few friends. Originally discovered at LifeHacker (http://lifehacker.com/5876559/sign-into-your-google-account-on-public-computers-without-typing-anything)

  1. At a public terminal, visit https://accounts.google.com/sesame
  2. Fire up your camera’s QR reader/scanner.
  3. On your phone, allow the URL to open that the QR has scanned.
  4. Choose Gmail or iGoogle.
  5. Your browser will log you in.

Enjoy!
[SLVideoPlayer file=SESAME.mp4, width=640, height=480 /]

Gallery3 + Nginx

I have Gallery3 working with Nginx. Here’s my setup and some configuration for http://gallery.techish.net/   I no longer am using Gallery3 or nginx.  (7/21/2012)

  • Nginx 1.0.11
  • PHP 5.3.3-7
  • PHP5 GD Graphics Library
  • Gallery 3.0.2

Nginx virtual host configuration:

server {
    server_name gallery.techish.net;
    root /var/www/gallery.techish.net;
    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_php;
    location / {
    fastcgi_index  index.php;
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+.php)(.*)$;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param  PATH_INFO        $fastcgi_path_info;
    include fastcgi_params;
        index index.php;
        if (-f $request_filename) {
                expires max;
                break;
        }
        if (!-e $request_filename) {
                rewrite ^/(.+)$ /index.php?kohana_uri=$1 last;
        }
    }
}

I also had to modify Gallery3’s configuration (/application/config/config.php):

$config["index_page"] = "";

Much of the tips came from:  http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery3:Using_NGINX

Using Google Analytics to Find Out Who Is On My Website

Using Google Analytics to Find Out Who Is On My Website

I have installed Google Analytics code on my site, can I find out who has visited my site?
The answer is yes and no. While you cannot find the specific person who visited your site we can get pretty close. We can find what Google calls the Service Provider, but if the visitor is using a static IP address like most major companies the WhoIs information will appear in place of the Service Provider.
 
Let’s begin accessing this information.
 

  1. Log into your Google analytics account.width=600
  2. Select Service Provider under System and view the full reportwidth=600
  3. Begin to click through your Service Providers until you see one you are interested in you should skip known ISPs, they cover too broad of an area, we are looking for Static IPs which will typically be a company name.
  4. If you know the name you are looking for type it into the search bar to determine if they visited your site.width=600
  5. Once you have found the Service Provider Name (in the example case it will be “wendy s international inc.”) click on advanced segments in the top left corner and create a new custom segment.width=600
  6. Give your Custom Segment a name and set it to *Include* *Service Provider* *Containing* and type in the name from step 4, save your segment.
  7. Click Advanced Segments again and uncheck All Visits (on the left) and ensure your new custom segment is checked (on the right) and select Apply.

 
Now all reports apply only to this “Service Provider” which is really the Static IP of your visitor. Use the Location reports to find out what city and state they are from, use the Technology reports to find the browser and OS, Use the Traffic Sources to find what search engine and keywords they used to find your site, or what site they linked from, and of course content reports to determine what pages they looked at and for how long.
There are many more reports within Google Analytics to get more in-depth information but these are the basics.


 

Create an Image Snapshot of a Website Online

I have a little tool I created that will take a URL and convert the content at that URL into a JPEG image.
https://techish.net/pub/websitesnapshot/
I’m not sure it’ll be useful and was only created/hacked together because of an idea that I had that I have since abandoned.  The backend uses wkhtmltoimage-amd64 to do the magic the rest is PHP handler.
I have added the ability to choose width of the snapshot using “width” paramater.  For example:  https://techish.net/pub/websitesnapshot/?url=http://www.google.com/&width=640
Note that the width value must be less than 2048.
You can see other people’s images by adding images/ to the end of the above URL.