Project B Is Coming

This is not my Project B Rationale blog. It is just letting you know I am still alive and kicking and working on my project of course.

It has taken a while to decide what I am doing for my project. Originally I was going tell a story of the journey my Grandfather took when he enlisted to fight in WWII. Unforunately he died while in action in Crete. It is also really hard getting family history since my Father and Aunty are no longer alive.(No violins please) It would have involved a lot of research at the National Archives of Australia and the Australian War Memorial which would have taken up far too much time researching. So I decided to work on datavisualization.

The datavisualization will be based on stats from my website www.fandangle.com.au . Sounds great, except my ISP's CPanel doesn't have access to the Raw Access Logs to do a proper analysis of the data. But all is not lost. I can copy and paste stats from Awstats on the ISP's CPanel. Not as detailed as I would have liked.

To format the data properly I created a visual basic program to save a lot of manual copy/paste/edit etc work. The project will utilize Google Visualization API using Google Maps and Google Earth. Sounds easy. Not really. It will involve a lot of technical work. The first visualization will be a map displaying a number of pin point markers showing what countries visitors to my website have come from. To use the Google Map API, I have to provide the country names, country abreviation codes and latitude/longitude coordinates of the various countries. Then there is the HTML and Java codes I have to manipulate. I might make a visual basic program to do this automatically for me. It may lead to a tool I can offer on my website so that anyone interested in Google Maps as a datavisualiztion tool can generate the code to embed the maps on their website or blog.

When it comes to a project this size I don't want to do it just for the sake of my studies. There needs to be a reason why I'm doing this work. So the other reason for doing this project is so I can monitor my website traffic. I have Google Adsense ads (Call me a capitalist - we have to survive some how) on my website and need to increase my traffic to increase my monetizing chances.

I can see this project will end up being an on going venture, because I would like to eventually make a PHP application using MySQL on a LAMP (Linux) server to help in website log statistical analysis.

So that is the state I am in at present. Please stay tuned for the continuing story.

References
Google Visualization API: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/
National Archive of Australia: http://www.naa.gov.au/
Australia War Memorial: http://www.awm.gov.au/
My Website: http://www.fandangle.com.au
CPanel: http://www.cpanel.net/
Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/
Google Earth: http://earth.google.com/
Google Adsense: http://www.Google.com.au/AdSense
MySQL: http:/www.mysql.com
PHP: http://www.php.net/