2011 Blog Review

I ventured into google analytics the other day to check out some browser stats, the general result is positive, by the way - 42% Firefox, 27% Chrome & 20% IE, Safari only down at 4%.

But what I thought I'd do is have a look at last years stats - it seems to be the thing to do this time of year...

Off the bat I'm happy with over 50% increase in page views compared to 2010. I don't care so much about specific numbers, but it's good to know whatever I'm doing is expanding. I'm quite motivated to write more often this year - I already have a bunch scheduled - once a week every Wednesday is the aim. Plus any random stuff I might put up, usually on a lighter note on Friday.

I'm happy I had the motivation one week while on the road to re-design the blog to bring it into this decade. It looks less tacky and a little bit more thought out. There's still a few little things I want to touch up, but it will do for now. Other projects on the go first...

As for what people are reading, in 2010 here are the top 5 pages (behind root)

1. Short circuit evaluations - I promoted this topic a bit, I'm a big fan of COALESCE
2. Another Apex 4.0 feature for Forms - Tree view in Apex 4.0
3. Why I use Google Chrome for Oracle Apex - because it's awesome and light!
4. Using JQuery dialog boxes - Very handy
5. Automating Apex backups from DB - backup backup backup

In 2011 we moved along to more focused pages

1. Presentations - I think my Apex Security one bumped those stats up
2. A mash of Oracle related thoughts - lots of distinct topics, looking back
3. Automating Apex backups from DB - up from fifth, good work backing up!
4. Useful Oracle Apex URLs - Popular with those learning
5. Apex in Amazon Cloud - Listen out this year, I'll probably be doing a cloud implementation in 2012 and I'll be sure to blog about it - and probably do a prezi in October.

Most weren't hugely out of the ball park, although last year 1st had 50% more hits than 5th, but it does show what people specifically read I guess, as opposed to strolling past on apexblogs.info

Most visitors are from US by far, Australia distant second, then UK, India, Germany just pipping Netherlands. Canada-Russia equal, then drops away.

Top mobile devices - iPhone, iPad, (not set), Samsung Galaxy S (probably me ;-), HTC Sappire

Windows order magnitude more than Mac, then Linux.

And finally top search terms - all fairly obvious. "Oracle" three times more than "oracle apex jquery datepicker"; some not provided; "triangle circle square", "oracle apex", "apex amazon cloud", "apex post calculation computation", "apex login page", "oracle apex 4.2"

The last one is interesting since it I published my wish list in early Jan, but accidentally published it as December when I first drafted it. It falls in the 2011/12 archive - so I wonder how that gets counted in their queries ;-)

There are no major milestones to come, I haven't reached 200 posts yet, so in time... I'm glad I started.

I'll have to remember to do this next year and compare!

Photo by Robbert van der Steeg - check this one out!

Why I use Google Chrome for Oracle APEX Development

I keep it no secret I'm a fan of Google products. Funny considering I remember I used to go out of my way to use other search engines when I was at uni, like Altavista.

Recently I read a great an eye catching article 20 Instant Upgrades to Make Chrome Better than Firefox. I've been using Chrome a fair bit recently - it certainly loads faster than Firefox, even though I've been advised that's because of all the Firefox add-ins I've applied. In some ways I beg to differ - I have a VMware instance with only Firebug added, and Chrome still anecdotally performs better.

As a database developer when it comes to Application Express, Chrome seems snappier and more responsive. I thought I'd mention a few things about this article that stood out for me when it comes to APEX.

Searching

I like to provide people options to search through Oracle Documentation, and here is another new trick.

Under the search options you can add a search engine.

An example URL might be:
http://www.oracle.com/pls/db102/search?remark=quick_search&tab_id=&format=ranked&word=%s

Then when searching within the "Omnibar", you can type "oracle", press tab, and all search results will be pertinent to Oracle 10gR2.

Alternatively you could use something like the site: search keyword in Google Search to form your URL.

Stats for Nerds

I can't imagine our APEX applications will consume too many resources, but you can certainly use this nifty feature to find out what other tabs may be devouring valuable CPU/memory on your hardware.

Shift-Escape brings up this little task manager, and the "Stats for Nerds" link give you even more information.


Firebug for Chrome

Don't even need to worry about installing an add-on. Just right click on your page and select "Inspect Element". A wealth of options will now appear before you, allowing you to edit your web-pages on the fly - a necessity for many APEX developers.

Synchronising bookmarks

Xmarks has been a great find for me, and while this feature isn't necessarily APEX specific, I find it very handy in my line of work. For quite a while, Xmarks wasn't available for Chrome, but given a Google account, Chrome will synchronise for you.

Shrink your tabs

While the APEX favicon may not be all the exciting, you can right click on your tabs and pin them to your tab bar, allowing you more room to identify and open other tabs during your day of productive development.

IE Tab Add-on
For those pages that only work properly with Internet Explorer. Sigh.

Split Page View

The article mentions a URL that enables split screen viewing within your browser, which would be great for comparisons within APEX. It's just a shame these browsers don't do this inherently.

Portable Chrome

The article mentions one website, portableapps.com, but I know there's quite a few out there that provide the ability.

Added bonus

Something the article doesn't mention, but I'm sure many APEX developers will appreciate, the ability to resize text areas - out of the Chromium box - no need to worry about the ApexLib extension.

One day Penny noticed this on my laptop and suggested I installed the ApexLib APEX Builder extension - I didn't think I had, and after reading this article the hand slapped the forehead and I realised what was going on.

Chrome has come a long way since its early days. I do appreciate the fact we now have many major browsers affecting the market place and development community, in addition to some minor browsers targeting niche areas - Stainless should be good for those Mac users who'd like to operate multiple tabs with different crudentials - another APEX developer desire.

I know I'll continue to use Chrome for my APEX builder session.

Futher empowering search products

One of my recent presentations was inspired by some colleagues talking about the difficulty they find searching the Oracle documentation to find the information they require.

During this presentation I mention a book I read recently (alas I can't remember now which one) where they refer to the concept of the world's entire knowledge being stored on a device the size of a grain of sand. Seems a little fanciful now, but imagine what sounded fanciful back in 1901, and compare that to what we have today.

Of course the reason I made this reference was that our search engines are going to need to become smarter. And we're going to need to be smarter in relation to how we pool information from all resources.

For years now hardware has been sustaining growth to the approximation of Moore's Law. Hardware companies have certainly had their day in the sun, and that indeed continues. Oracle's recent partnership with Sun, releasing information on Exadata V2 show us what's happening in our little sphere.

Microsoft's time in the sun is beginning to wane. Competition grows strong between Bing & Google, and a recent news item caught my attention.

On Google's official blog they announced their future integration with Twitter. Now I mentioned how we need to be smarter with the way we integrate our information. I feel this is a good step towards this goal. Sites like Twitter are an untapped goldmine in regard to current information, current news stories, and the current opinions of the masses.

One of my all time favourite books explores (among other things) the power of real-time information. Richard Wiseman, psychologist and skeptic, recently used Twitter as a tool to conduct a scientific experiment. I heard him speak on a podcast recently where he's straining his brain trying to work out how to use social networking sites such as this that lead the cultural meme as an effective tool to do powerful studies on mass & diverse populations. Integration of this information with powerful search engines I'm sure will aid his work.

Arthur C. Clarke's book linked above mentions a generic "Search Engine" as being a tool ultimately hard-wired into our brains, such that we can use it to search for information, such as looking at the background of someone you just met while you strike a conversation.

Considering the world's knowledge is now more than just an ancient library of information, I feel that "information finding" companies like Google will be the strong force over the next few decades.

I also believe the tide is turning away from journalism and more towards blogs. I particularly find this on the scientific blogs I read. Recently it's been mentioned that perhaps we'll need to pay a subscription for obtaining news from major sources - just like buying a newspaper. I doubt such a model will work well, and for the type of new I'm interested in, I find science bloggers to a more accurate, objective and entertaining job. So perhaps future search engines also need to tailor to our preferences, our needs of the moment. We certainly see some of this happen now when we search for books on Amazon, or listen to music on iTunes or LastFM - common purchases are linked together and strengthen connections like the neural networks I learnt about in university.

Search facilities are the next big thing.

Now before I finish, considering this is an Oracle themed blog, I best mention one of Oracle's best search facilities is Oracle Text (formerly Oracle InterMedia). I'm waiting for the opportunity to explore this feature even more after developing a wonderful search facility a few years ago. Perhaps this requires a future presentation to highlight this possibly underutilised feature.

My thoughts for this week conclude with a quote sourced from Twitter via my RSS feed.

He who does not research has nothing to teach ~ Unknown