Archive for July, 2008
Bitbucket, Hosted Mercurial Source Control
Bitbucket is the latest project by Jesper Nøhr. If the name looks familiar, it’s because I wrote about a Jesper in March when he used Django and Python as a rapid development environment for an indy advertising product named Indiego Connection.
This time around, Jesper has moved gears to provide a hosting for a popular distributed version control system named Mercurial. I haven’t started drinking the distributed version control kool-aid just yet, however it has been gaining a lot of attention lately via another open source product named Git, developed by Linus Torvalds – the creator of the Linux kernel.
The Mercurial hosting provided by Bitbucket comes in a few different flavours, one of which is free and allows up to 150Mb of storage. I really like the fact that they are not attempting to offer a completely free service, if they were – I suspect that it’d be under enormous pressure. The cost of using Bitbucket to host your Mercurial repositories is very reasonable, starting from $5/month and stepping up to $100/month which includes 25Gb of storage.
Bitbucket provides a very convenient interface for interacting with the Mercurial repositories. As with most web interfaces to source control management packages, you can browse through different repositories, see all of the changes flowing through them and compare them if you like. A couple features that simpler products don’t support that I like is that you can ‘follow’ a repository, create queues for patches related to a repository, download the repository at time x in zip, gz or bz2 formats and it provides an easy to understand visual linking between changesets.
If you are looking for Mercurial hosting, I would definitely investigate whether Bitbucket is a suitable candidate to store whatever you need versioned. The service certainly looks the goods and from what I’m reading online, it is getting really solid reviews already.
Google Analytics User Management Simplified
Google have simplified the account management interface for Google Analytics. Previously when adding a user into the system, you needed to provide:
- an email address of a a valid Google Account
- first name
- surname
- access level (administrator/reporting)
It appears that you no longer need to provide the first name and surname information. Interestingly though, they have not been marked optional fields, they have been completely removed from the interface.
To my knowledge, the first name and surname information isn’t visible anywhere within Google Analytics (please correct me if I’ve just missed it). If it isn’t displayed or is in limited use, it’s possible Google realised that they were increasing the barrier of entry for no tangible benefit or that they were duplicating information already available within a Google Account.
Web Usability 101, Useful & Descriptive Link Text
Posted by Alistair in Commentary on July 6, 2008
I’m an advocate for sensible usability on web sites and fully support the usability guidelines that recommend descriptive link text. There are measurable improvements to a users browsing experience when a webmaster makes a conscious decision to use useful link text, instead of an uninformative ‘click here’.
One particular aspect of useful link text that I try to abide by at all times, is that the link text should be descriptive and should reflect the resource that it is linking to. As an example, if you’re linking to a web page about the Porsche 911 GT3 RS, then a useful link might be Porsche 911 GT3 RS.
A popular technology site, TechCrunch has various web real estates that it promotes at every opportunity – however I think of late they are going a little too far with their frivolous, slap happy linking. Recently, the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that California has secured the manufacturing plant from Tesla, bringing it back from New Mexico.
In the article on TechCrunch, they provide a number of links (link text and URI below):
- Tesla Motors, http://www.teslamotors.com/
- the Roadster model, http://www.crunchgear.com/tag/tesla/
- “Come with me if you want to live”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHV6OzHjWV8
- “Do it, do it now”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6ALySsPXt0
and my beef is with the second in the above list. When viewing that article, I expected that link to take me to the Roadster vehicle home page within the Tesla Motors site, instead if took me off to a completely useless page regarding Tesla Motors (the company) within their business information site CrunchGear.
I’m all for TechCrunch promoting their other web assets, however I’m confident that their readers would enjoy their site that much more if they’d find a more appropriate manner in which to promote CrunchGear instead of deceptively linking into that site.
Sun Java & Bundling Google Toolbar
Posted by Alistair in Commentary on July 15, 2008
During this particular update, I happened to notice (not sure if it was there before) – however Sun are now bundling (optionally of course), Google Toolbar with the Java installer. I’m all for providing the automatic update, however I don’t believe they should be bundling additional software, optional or otherwise with an automatic update.
I have no issue if you just installed Java for the first time and you have chosen to install the additional software, however adding it into an update and having it enabled by default is just a little to slimy for my liking.
google, google toolbar, java, sun
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