Filed under: Developer, Web services, web 2.0
NuConomy: Next-gen web analytics
Web analytics is an increasingly important metric for web publishers. It used to just be about tracking how many visitors you get and how many pages they view. Technology has improved so that you can now track site entry points, popular keywords, specific post metrics, out-bound clicks, nationality of your visitors and more. The problem is, to actually get that data into something useful, you usually have to dedicate a bunch of time analyzing statistics or you have to pay for an expensive commericial analytics package. Today, NuConomy is officially launching its free web analytics platform, NuConomy Studio, designed to meet both of those challenges.
The platform that NuConomy will most likely be compared to is Google Analytics, because both are free and both offer easy integration into various web platforms. In its scope, however, NuConomy Studio is much more akin to Omniture, but without the hefty licensing fee that pretty much excludes all but the biggest sites from taking advantage of its enhanced metrics.
For instance, most analytics programs can't monitor interaction with JavaScript (AJAX) or Flash elements. So you can't get a metric on how frequently that YouTube video is played (or which video is most popular). NuConomy can track AJAX, Flash and Silverlight and then show you what elements (or videos) were most popular. With YouTube videos, you can even find out how visitors are watching the videos before stopping or going to another page. So if you're a VBlogger, you can better pinpoint what is working and what isn't.
Back a couple of years ago, there was a really great (for its day) statistics package called ShortStat that was available for free for sites running on PHP / MySQL. ShortStat became extremely popular, and eventually evolved into a commercial statistics package called Mint. As such, development on ShortStat stopped. 
Shaun Inman has released 
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
