Google Analytics releases a new feature two weeks ago, allowing sites to anonymously share data with comparable sites. Benchmarking site traffic has been something we've suggested to clients in the past, and in a few cases have facilitated it on a small scale. But now, you can compare how your blog, online community, association, or non-profit's website compares to peers who also use GA. I'd stress that you're comparing yourself to other peers who use the service and choose to share the data so there is some selection bias, and its up to Google to decide who you are compared with. Still, it makes available data that would otherwise be expensive or impossible to get, and as more sites otp to share their traffic, it can get better. You can learn how to enable this and what you can compare over at googlesystem.

The system is very beta at the moment, and the "Verticals" used to categorize sites are few at the moment. It can still help answer questions like:

• What are overall traffic patterns in my sector?
• Is my traffic growth/decline part of an overall traffic growth/decline or unique to my site?
• What's an "average" site like mine get in Page Visits/Visitors/Bounce Rate/New Vistors, and how do I compare?
  

Technorati Tags: Google Analytics, nptech

Do you need to extract text from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Adobe PDF files? We recently added full text searching of uploaded files to ProjectSpaces. Thanks to the work of other hackers, we were able to utilize command line utilities to extract meaningful text from proprietary, and/or binary files. Once implemented, we could index the majority of files uploaded by our users and present matching files for search queries.

catdoc for Word and Excel files

The catdoc package (Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat distros). On a Debian or Ubuntu server you can install the package with

sudo apt-get install catdoc

sudo up2date tk
sudo rpm -ivh catdoc-0.94.2-3.el4.i386.rpm

catdoc -w ~/MeetingNotes.doc

Simlary you can get the content from an Excel spreadsheet with:

xls2cvs ~/Sales.xls

Executing the command above pipes the contents of your spreadsheet to STDOUT with comma-separated values.

xpdf for PDF files

The xpdf package provides a command line utility named pdftotext, which can parse PDF files up to version 1.5. This is a straightforward package to install on Debian or RedHat servers either:

sudo apt-get install xpdf

sudo up2date xpdf

The utility pdftotext is a little trickier to use, because by default it wants to save the extracted text to another file. By specifying - as the target file, output is sent to STDOUT instead.

pdftotext ~/DeveloperResume.pdf -

xlhtml for Powerpoint

Although catdoc also bundles a utility named catppt. I didn't not have any success in getting meaningful output from Powerpoint files with catppt. Instead, I settled on using ppthtml. This utility maybe a little harder to find a package for your distribution. On Ubuntu, it can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install ppthtml

sudo rpm -ivh xlhtml-0.5-2.el4.sme.i386.rpm 

Usage of ppthtml is straightforward:

ppthtml ~/ConferenceSlides.ppt

The text of the Powerpoint file will be sent to STDOUT and formatted as HTML. Since only text is extracted, images and text contained inside images will be ignored.

Capturing content in PHP

Above, I emphasized how to send output to STDOUT. By doing so, with php we can then use the exec command to extract text and process it further or save it to a database table. A function for working with a word file might look like:

/**
 * Attempts to extracts text from a MS Word file
 * @param string full path to file
 * @return string
 */
function extractWord($word_file) 
{
    if (file_exists($word_file)
    {
        // prevent malicious command execution 
        exec("/usr/bin/catdoc -w ' . escapeshellarg($word_file), $output);

        // $output is an array corresponding to lines of output
        return join("\n", $output);
    }
}

Functions for extracting from Excel, Powerpoint, and PDF files would only require switching the command line tool.

What can we do with such tools?

1. Add them to a mysql table for simple FULLTEXT searching.
2. Use Yahoo's Term Extraction service to extract meaningful keywords
3. Index them with a more advanced full text search engine.
4. Provide a text preview of file contents so that users don't fire up a client application or browser plugin.

I'd love to hear other ideas too!

Worth closer inspection, today Kintera announced that they've published an open API to allow integration directly with Kintera Technology. You can view the API documentation here. Some initial thoughts:

• You need a Kintera Sphere account with the API enabled (duh).
• If you are on PHP, they recommend version 5, since PHP4 will be dead soon.
• Sample code is available for C#, Java, and PHP. Must mean that that not a lot of Kintera clients have Ruby, Python, or Perl sites.
• The API is SOAP based, which is a little heavier to program, and can be difficult to debug.
• The API has methods for describing entities (business objects), creating new records, retrieving one or more records, updating a record, and deleting a record.
• A sign that they've thought ahead, for making batch operations easy, there is a GetUpdate method to return updated records within a specified time frame.
• Seems like you'll be able to run arbitrary queries in the CRM database, and also Execute transactions.
• One potentially worrying aspect, is that the API does not apply entity access restrictions. I'm not versed in exactly what that means, but it sounds like you are connecting as the equivalent of "root" and can do almost whatever you want via the API.
• I couldn't find any mention of the API being rate limited to so-many queries or calls a day.

HT: Non-profit Tech Blog