Issue #4

It’s the fourth issue of the new format, and it’s time to introduce another small section that will be happening every now and then (Ideally every 4 weeks), Podcasts! I listen to loads of Podcasts every day, and I thought it would be a good idea to share a few of my absolute favourites.

There’s nothing new on the blog this week, so I can’t link to anything there, but I have a variety of interesting links and videos for you.

A subway-style map of the Roman roads of Britain
This is pretty interesting, as most of the places still have similar names!

Random Shopper — Randomized Consumerism
A project that started way back in 2012 by Darius Kazemi, that purchases random items every month from Amazon! It’s giving me some ideas.

Developing for iPhone Pro – Allen Pike
Very interesting ideas about the new layout that is surely going to take some shape in the rumoured iPhone pro.

747-8 Captain shared pics with Singapore… – Jamaica Aviation Spotters
Pilots used AirDrop between planes! In the sky!

Videos

The Right Way to Pop Your AirPods Out of the Case

Beme News Update #3: This Is Not A Film Review
An interesting video on the background of the Dunkirk film, and what things were like around that time.

Podcasts (All links for Overcast)

What I’m Up To

I would say this week has been a partially productive week, in that I finally started my mini web analytics project. I won’t write up too much technical details here, that will be written up in full and posted to my blog within the next few days I hope.

But essentially, I wanted a super minimal way to track how many views my blog was getting, and whether another url referred it.

The only data that’s stored is the title and url of the webpage that was loaded, so just a url to a blog post of mine, and also the referrer url that is stored in the DOM. I’ve already noticed that this is usually blank, and therefore is only partially useful, and then of course the date and time it was loaded.

It’s live now, so all visitors on my blog will be logged (I wouldn’t call it tracking), and while I have a way to look at the raw data, the next step will be to create some kind of dashboard for myself.

However, the few bits of data that I mentioned, will be the only ones that are ever collected. So I’m not looking to invade anyone’s privacy. Plus, the data isn’t being anonymised when I store it, because there’s literally no personal data even being sent to the server.

Looking back at the past few paragraphs, I probably did explain it in more depth than I was going to, but oh well.