The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
These four versatile web analytics tools provide valuable insights on your customers and site visitors while keeping you in control.
Top 4 open source alternatives to Google Analytics | Opensource.com https://opensource.com/article/18/1/top-4-open-source-analytics-tools
We use Matomo (formerly Piwik) on CALI websites. We decided to host our own analytics for a few reasons including performance, data control, and to better choose the options we use.
More than 2,000 WordPress websites are infected with a keylogger | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/more-than-2000-wordpress-websites-are-infected-with-a-keylogger/
Setting up your own podcast hosting isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Our step-by-step guide covers all you need to know to quickly set up your own self-hosted podcast library on a WordPress website, measure your podcast’s success and submit it to iTunes.
Source: Podcast Hosting with WordPress: Your Advanced Guide | Barn2 Media
Podcasting is easier than ever with WordPress and this is a pretty good guide to get you started.
A static site generator for making documentation sites from one or more versioned content repositories.
A documentation pipeline that enables docs, product, and engineering teams to create, manage, remix, and publish documentation sites composed in AsciiDoc and sourced from multiple versioned content repositories.
See details at https://antora.org/ and get the code at https://gitlab.com/antora/antora
Antora is designed to generate and manage static, versioned documentation sites using AsciiDoc. Works with git across multiple repos to pull together documentation for a project into a single site.
This popped up on my Github feed recently. Looks like Prof. Michael Poulshock is taking a shot at using Github to manage materials for his Legal Decision Technology course being taught in the Spring 2018 semester at Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law. The course itself looks pretty interesting, according to the syllabus:
This course explores how legal decision technology can be used to expand public access to legal information. Students will learn about cutting edge legal decision technologies, hone their statutory interpretation skills, and build interactive apps that answer specific legal questions. This is a hands-on, lab-style class, but no prior programming experience is required.
The course is going to make use of tool called Oracle Policy Modeling which I had not heard of before but seems interesting. Heck, I’m even going to download a copy and take it for a spin.
Always great to see law professors taking advantage of interesting tool in the courses they teach. Maybe Prof. Poulshock will head to CALIcon18 in June to talk about the course and how it went.
The Github repo is at https://github.com/mpoulshock/Drexel-Legal-Decision-Technology-Spring-2018
Multisite Roadmap – Make WordPress Core https://make.wordpress.org/core/roadmap/multisite/
Best Legal Blog Contest | Legal Scholarship Blog http://www.legalscholarshipblog.com/2017/10/03/best-legal-blog-contest-2/
Rescuing Pluto from the Cold: Creating an Assessment-Centered Legal Education by Steven Friedland :: SSRN https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3019431
This is something you just see everyday. Prof. Eric Fink at Elon Law School is using GitHub to manage and serve websites for his courses. This is a great idea and now I’m wondering if there are other law profs out there doing this sort of thing.
MySQL introduced a native JSON data type in MySQL 5.7. So like an integer, a char, or a real, there became a way to store an entire JSON document in a column in a table of a database—and this document in a column could be roughly a gigabyte in size! The server would make sure it was a valid JSON document and then save it in a binary format that’s optimized for searching. This new data type has probably been responsible for more upgrades of MySQL than any other feature.
The data type also comes with over 20 functions. These functions will extract key-value pairs from the document, update data, provide metadata about the data, output non-JSON columns in JSON format, and more. And it’s much easier on the psyche than REGEX.
Source: What you need to know about JSON in MySQL | Opensource.com
Well, I guess I really do need to update to MySQL 5.7 and keep track of what’s going on in version 8 development.
From the MySQL 5.7 docs on the JSON data type:
As of MySQL 5.7.8, MySQL supports a native
JSONdata type that enables efficient access to data in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) documents. TheJSONdata type provides these advantages over storing JSON-format strings in a string column:
- Automatic validation of JSON documents stored in
JSONcolumns. Invalid documents produce an error.- Optimized storage format. JSON documents stored in
JSONcolumns are converted to an internal format that permits quick read access to document elements. When the server later must read a JSON value stored in this binary format, the value need not be parsed from a text representation. The binary format is structured to enable the server to look up subobjects or nested values directly by key or array index without reading all values before or after them in the document.
I’ve got a number of project that would benefit from this right now.