Archive for October, 2013

Too Lazy to Click: A Decline in Traffic with a Tips Panel

Oct 17 2013 Published by under Fiddle Salad,Programming

After launching the a new tips panel on Fiddle Salad that shows on top of other dialog windows whenever a fiddle is opened, I found a decline in traffic. Specifically, page views decreased. Does that mean the tips were poorly done? To investigate, I compared the views in the past 30 days to the previous period and looked at the traffic for different pages. The top pages ranked by page view saw an increase in ratio compared to the rest. My hypothesis is that when opening a saved fiddle, users were deterred by the tip panel that opened. I found the data to back up the hypothesis.
google analytics traffic
The analysis is that there were 0 visitors to the pages in the past 30 days because they just didn’t bother to check off “Show tips on startup”. This made sense, as the tips panel often blocked pieces of code. My plan is to just show the tips panel once a day so that opening saved fiddles wouldn’t show it.

Update:
I found out that the new tab page in Chrome stable was changed, removing the apps. This would explain the decline in traffic on the CoffeeScript IDE page. This change has been there for 4 months on the Chrome beta channel that I use on Windows.

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Building UIs with Wijmo

Oct 11 2013 Published by under Coincidences,Life,Programming

Right after I finished my classes at Waterloo, I started writing my book on Wijmo. Wijmo is an advanced widget library based on jQuery UI, which is the most popular UI toolkit in the community. The preface to my book explains what the book is about:

Wijmo is a new JavaScript library focusing on user interface widgets. It builds on jQuery UI, enhancing existing widgets, and adding new ones. In this book we examine the Wijmo widgets essential for web development. The useful configuration options for 15 widgets are covered along with their usage scenarios. Most of the chapters take a code recipe approach for tasks that occur often in web development. Whenever you come across a widget or user interface component that you’ve implemented before, chances are that Wijmo widgets have you covered. The chapters in this book are designed to get you started using the widgets in no time. On the other hand, Chapter 6, Dashboard with Wijmo Grid, takes a different approach in building an application and explaining how it works.

I would recommend buying this book if you’ve already purchased a license for Wijmo or you plan to be using Wijmo for development. On my project at work and while writing this book, I have used Wijmo in combination with Knockout to put together UIs.

Building UIs With Wijmo was just published last month. I was originally contacted by the publisher to write the book because I had used Wijmo on one of my Github projects. The best thing is one favourite pet project leads to another. I will save that for another post, but for now there is a contest running on Fiddle Salad if you want a free copy.

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