Chris Schalenborgh

Laravel 4 released

Great news! My favorite PHP framework Laravel finally released version 4 after 5 public beta’s and months of waiting. Why am I so happy? Well.. it makes my job as a developer a lot simpler compared to my Zend Framework days.

Here’s why you must try Laravel

  • – Smart framework: write less code (faster + easier)
  • – Works with composer, the PHP plugin tool
  • – Filters, events, rest, built-in auth, … it has it all out of the box
  • – Elequent ORM: the smartest and easiest PHP ORM today!
  • – Unit testing for all components

So what’s new in Laravel 4?

  • – L4 now runs on PHP >= 5.3.7
  • – PSR-0 code standards are used
  • – Composer (packagist.org) instead of Laravel bundles
  • – Lot’s of small but convenient little tweaks and options
  • – Mail is now built in
  • – L4 is built with Unit Testing in mind
  • – Great community!
  • – The command line tool (artisan) is now more powerful

 

Here’s what changed in L4:
https://github.com/laravel/framework

Laravel 4 introduction

Download Laravel @ http://laravel.com/, and make sure to follow them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/laravelphp

Chris Schalenborgh

Facebook: the numbers (infographic)

fb_infographic

Chris Schalenborgh

Google Universal Analytics: the next big thing?

Today I came across a video about Universal Analytics, Google’s self-proclaimed next big thing.

But is it really? In short? Yes! Here’s why.

What is the difference between Google Analytics and Google Universal Analytics?

Universal Analytics tracks much more than just visits to a website likes Google Analytics does. Where Google Analytics (based on Urchin) tracks visits, Universal Analytics tracks visitors. This allows us to do cross-device tracking which mean even more detailed statistics!

google-universal-analytics

Offline conversions

With the Measurement Protocol you’re now able to ‘plug in’ extra user data, provided by offline/external appliances such as an RFID chip, apps, sensors, etc. Have a look at the YouTube video in my introduction. As a geek, I absolutely love this. The more data the merrier.

Customisable session timeouts

You can now alter this ourselves. Previously this limit was a hard fixed 30 minutes.

Analytics.js

Ga.js becomes analytics.js. The include code also changes.

universal analytics code

Custom dimensions/metrics

Custom dimensions/metrics allows you to create specific metrics in combination with your CRM’s database. See this as custom variables 2.0.

External cost structure

External input, external output. We’re now able to import external costs structures so we can calculate our conversions and ROI even more accurate. Back in the old days.. we could only import Google Adwords costs.

And much, much more..

Here’s some more useful and interesting links I found about Google Universal Analytics:

Did I forgot to mention something very important about Universal Analytics? Please leave a note in the comments 🙂

 

Chris Schalenborgh

Popular websites 10 years ago

Here’s some screenshots of popular websites (Linkedin, Facebook, Google, Twitter, eBay, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, Hotmail, Blogger, Apple), but 10 years ago.. Pretty neat how things evolved right? Who can still remember this?

websites