It’s about connecting with the fans, not creeping them out
To me, small, personal projects are always opportunities. Opportunities to learn, to be creative, and to be heard.
During the past five years, I’ve run and managed nearly a dozen web projects, with traffic ranging from tens to tens of thousands visitors each day. Naturally, larger websites have more at stake. They demand round-the-clock monitoring and weekly analysis. But analytics play a huge role in small, personal projects, too.
With less-frequently visited properties it’s a lot harder to derive statistically-significant conclusions. Data is noisy and takes a long time to collect. Acting on that data is also difficult. …
A Better Naming and File Organization System
The curse and the gift of React.js is the fact that it is not opinionated in terms of how you structure your components and files. Do what you want and it’ll work. But with every new project it’s a “blank slate” problem.
This article is written from a perspective of a person building (and finally refactoring) the front-end of a blogging platform designed for film photography enthusiasts. Besides listing and displaying articles, the app provides admin controls and a full rich text editorial suite, comprised of 280 files and folders. The app in question is Analog.Cafe.
Preface 1: “dumb” and “smart” components: not a good way to sort your files.
- app/
…Enhancing JavaScript bot UI with localStorage
Bot interfaces are fun for the users and advantageous for those who build them (if done right). The concept isn’t new, though today it’s especially powerful.
For developers, bots mean less time spent designing and building custom interfaces. It’s just text bubbles; plus many existing platforms offer to completely avoid this process with their already-successful apps’ APIs (i.e. Google Assistant).
For users, bots mean a possibility of hands-free interaction (via voice) and a more natural and/or seamless way to converse with machines.
A simple solution.
When I build things I tend to look for simple solutions, sans bloat, which could be easily understood…
Entire trip lasted around four days, half of which I spent in the air. Three different planes carried me from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, then Taipei, then San Francisco. Three more did it again in reverse order.
I crossed the Pacific twice for a ten-minute meeting.
A week prior, Ishtiaq called first thing in the morning with the news: Y Combinator invited us for an interview and all three co-founders had to be there.
Y Combinator is the most respected startup accelerator program on the planet. They helped Air BnB, Dropbox and Reddit (amongst hundreds of others) get to the…
Happy Holidays!
This is Dmitri, CTO and co-founder of Archie.AI.
I would like to personally thank you for being our pioneering customer. With your support and feedback, we are able to help over a thousand businesses of various sizes understand and interact with data better. Below is a quick recap of what happened during the past twelve months.
2017 was a huge! We launched six products, amongst hundreds of features, including:
Email Bot — Cut through the clutter of Google Analytics with free, weekly email reports.
How to set up weekly email reports from your GA account with traffic & conversion summary, predictions and insights
TL;DR: Here’s the link for an app that does it for you.
I spend a lot of my time working with Google Analytics. I measure visitors of an e-commerce website that sells prints, a community blog, a Kickstarter page for when my campaign was live and multiple web properties owned by the start up I co-founded. It’s a real hassle to try and keep up with all that data, let alone making sense of it.
I thought that my problem was unique to serial webmasters, however it turns out that making sense of Google Analytics can be a challenge, even…
A super-simple and FREE way to publish *quality* static websites using GitHub pages.
Note 1: To perform the steps in this article you will need to know how to use GitHub and write or produce HTML.
Note 2: Although this method grants you a HTTPS:// URL, it is not recommended for any websites that collect and store private user information.
A couple of short months ago I wrote: “Own Your Bot” for the Archie.AI publication here on Medium. Today I’d like you to follow this short guide to help you set up your own FREE static website using no hacks, no shitty builders, with HTTPS, with versioning and with auto-deployment.
No hacks, no…
A super simple JavaScript library to build your own bot on the web
Bots are hot. It seems that every startup in the Valley wants a bot nowadays.
It would be silly to think that we’ve never seen this type of interface before. Turing Test and command line interface (CLI) was around for 60+ years.
Remember making payments and voting over SMS? That was easy and fun. But games are more fun.
Computer games pioneered design and, most importantly, user interest in this space. Up until it started to spill over into projects that revolved exclusively around chat, like CleverBot. We humans have been enjoying conversing with machines for a while. …
By Bailey Tovar
I love taking pictures. I believe that a photograph can preserve a single moment in ever-changing reality, forever. As we move forward in time, constantly altering our existence it’s nice to look back at old images and know that the memory we hold dear can be relieved again and again.
My adventure in photography started with digital tools. As the journey progressed, I got introduced to 35mm and instant film formats. And for that, I will always be thankful.
Instant film is by far my favorite medium. It’s been gaining popularity quite fast recently (just check Instagram for #instax or…
An exploration of a beautiful season through film cameras
Note to the reader:
A new edition of “November, On Film,” along with more photo essays by 80+ authors can be found here.
Every couple of days I go through photography, art and story submissions. My objective is usually to find images and stories that work well together and are able to form a story. The story can have independent elements but they need to be connected by the common theme and aesthetic. Kind of like The Simpsons episodes: they are all separate, non-sequential anecdotes, but they are all about the Simpsons family.
The theme for this collection, as you may have guessed is…
Dmitri
Film photographer, writer, developer, designer, founder of Analog.Cafe.
