Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Anything with Flash output is highly inappropriate for most situations. While great for games and other multimedia applications, Flash “web sites” have numerous usability problems such as: - Inability to deep link to a page or article (nobody else can refer to your content effectively - the fabric of the Web becomes broken!) - Limited indexing support by search engines (I understand this JUST started to happen despite Flash being around for a decade) - Nonexistent support by accessible (audio) browsers - how do the visually impaired surf your Flash “web site”? - Flash “web site” is not available to people of any other languages. Google and other services will translate your content on-demand for people from other cultures, I’ve used this many times for pages written in other languages myself and find it highly useful. This does not work with Flash. - Navigational paradigm is typically broken with Flash. This is left to whoever plays the role of designer / information architect - with F...

Web analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing your web content’s data in order to glean meaningful information about how your site is being utilized by your users. There are plenty of Web analytics applications out there, and you probably already know the big guns such as Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, and remote-site services such as Alexa and Compete. We go off the trodden path and explore a few lesser-known Web analytics options. In this article, you’ll find 10 excellent and free tools and applications to help you gather and analyze data about your web content. 1. Piwik Piwik is an open-source Web analytics application developed using PHP and MySQL. It has a "plugins" system that allows for utmost extensibility and customization. Install only the plugins you need or go overboard and install them all – the choice is up to you. The plugins system, as you can imagine, also opens up possibilities for you to create your own custom extensions. This thing’s lightweight – ...