Surftrackr latest version: better time-slicing
Mar 18th 2008
I've just uploaded the latest version of Surftrackr, with a few amendments and additions based on user feedback. The packages are available from the download site; read on for more details of the changes.
The most prominent change is to the time-range selection, which (up until now) has been based on the number of days you want to go back in the logs, eg 2 or 7. This was a quick-and-easy fix for the early releases, since it made the form very easy and the programming easier still. However, I was using Surftrackr in a real live situation, and it soon became clear that people are interested in specific time-slices, so you can now specify a start and end date for Surftrackr.
Specifying Dates in Surftrackr
I looked long and hard at using some fancy JavaScript controls for specifying the dates, but overall I felt they were fiddly and led to too much screen clutter. Instead, I've used Labix's python-dateutil package (install it with easy_install python-dateutil) to allow times and dates to be entered directly. The advantages are:
- It's quicker than fiddling about with menus.
- You don't need to enter the time part - it will default to 'midnight' if you enter just the date, eg 2008-03-01.
- It accepts fuzzy dates, so you can say '2008-01-03 12:34:00' or '3 January 2008 12:34pm' (and a shed-load of alternatives - try it and see!) This is the magic that python-dateutil makes available.
If you're in the US, check the value of US_DATE_FORMAT in the settings.py file: if it's set to True, you can enter dates as '1/3/2008' to mean 3rd January 2008. Setting US_DATE_FORMAT to False makes that date equivalent to 1st March 2008.
Upgrading
If you don't want to scrub your database and start again, you can install the new code and alter your database like this:
alter table preferences_generalsetting drop column days_ago;
alter table preferences_generalsetting add column start_date datetime not null;
alter table preferences_generalsetting add column end_date datetime not null;
update preferences_generalsetting set end_date='2008-03-03 00:00:00';
update preferences_generalsetting set start_date='2008-03-01 00:00:00';
The last two commands are there to ensure you have a value in the start_date and end_date fields, which you can then change from the main page or your admin screen.
Simon Burns
18th March 2008