Analytics For Web Apps

i.TV recently launched a hot new web app called Viewer along with Entertainment Weekly. This app required some pretty specific analytics. The kind that a typical page-views style tracking system won't count.

The big diff with webapps vs. typical web pages is it's usually only one page, so instead of capturing pages you have to capture events. Logins, posts, filtering, replies, replay in our case. We also need to know how long people are using the app. These are all events (or at least can be).

Thankfully we found MixPanel, which provides some awesome graphs along with an easy to use event-capturing system.

In addition to some pretty awesome support. MixPanel lets you bookmark reports that you create and they e-mail them to you regularly. You can't yet bookmark funneled reports (the fancy kind that show you the drop-off between various events: log in, post, etc), but you can send multiple reports.

The monthly prices start at free, which is what we started with! That can log up to 25,000 events.

All in all MixPanel is awesome for doing analytics for web apps!

Mongoose and MongoHQ

A while ago I wrote a post about how to hook up node.js with the MongoHQ database hosting service. I still love MongoHQ, but my mongo wrapper around the node mongodb native driver sucked! I recently switched wereviewutah.com over to use Mongoose and just wanted to share with everyone how easy it is to use Mongoose with MongoHQ.

Sample Model File (models.js)


Sample Config File (./config/db.js)


Sample Route File (server.js)

Remove passphrase from SSL key

We have NGINX with SSL and automatically deploy with a script. We recently changed SSL certs and they were setup with a password, which makes it pretty hard to automatically deploy. I found this awesome tip on this blog http://blog.sosedoff.com/category/nginx/ for removing the password:

$ cp server.key server.key.org
$ openssl rsa -in server.key.org -out server.key
 
The newly created server.key file has no more passphrase in it.

NGINX Proxy solves CORS dilema

Hi guys,

This is a really special announcement:

We worked around our CORS IE problem, by adding some simple NGINX proxy's.

The problem we had was that CORS in IE doesn't support the with credentials directive, which is required for using sessions. (See fancy explanation here: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/07/cross-site-xmlhttprequest-with-cors/)

First we use $.support.cors from jQuery, which confirms that they have credentials support./

If they don't support it we modify their URLs to have the base server name in the path. (In our case links to something.i.tv would result in i.tv/something/)

Then in our NGINX conf, we used proxy_pass to send people that go to those URLs to the real server:
http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpProxyModule#proxy_pass

Here is the code:
location /something/ {
    proxy_pass http://something.i.tv/;
}

We had previously looked at node-httpd-proxy, building our own proxy server, trying a million hacks to get CORS to work with IE, wrapping everything in JSONP (doesn't work well with long POSTs), but this ended up working the best (and it's by far the easiest)!

Go Node.js, Express and NGINX! We love these things at i.tv.

Things I Want To Learn Someday (Soon)

1) CouchDB
2) Canvas Gaming
3) Unity 3D

ServerSide JavaScript Date Nonsense

Hi.

I want to format some dates in my Express views.

First of all, my employer, i.TV, has a DateTime library that we wrote that is alright:
https://gist.github.com/1125717

But I was hoping this would be something that's more in the view layer than than in the model/controller level.

Here are some libraries and functions that do some version of that:
http://www.datejs.com/
https://github.com/Flamefork/underscore.date
https://github.com/cdcarter/commonjs-date-formatting
http://timeago.yarp.com/

However, none of them did what I wanted. Here is one that did:
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-pretty-date/

This is what I did to make it work in my express views:

Coda Wish List

Hi Panic,

I do a lot of node.js and front-end web dev with Coda.

This is my unsolicited wish list for the next version:

1) I want support for syntax highlighting in files without extensions like "Jakefile".

2) I want to not have to use type="text/javascript" and type="text/css" and to get syntax highlighting of js/css within html files

3) I want better JavaScript completion including support for all of the natives like Date and Math.

4) Escape should consistently cancel the global search

5) Ctrl-Shift-F should always call the global search

6) Git integration

Sincerely,

Jamund Ferguson

http://www.jamund.com