March 15th, 2009

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brianjeremy.com was featured on the new browsershots.org gallery.  Not only is this a great honor, but this is by far one the of the best Q&A products for testing websites against most all browsers for maxium compatability.  Thanks Johann Rocholl and the Browsershots team, continue the great work — its an excellent product.

Posted in: Design | No Comments »

January 28th, 2009

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Personally, I’ve lost my voice [literally, not metaphorically] along with a plethora of business to attend to which has thus left my blog yet again under maintained. In all actuality, I think I have finally found my voice.  In the queue I will be shortly publishing a followup on the initial Bay Area Security Professionals / PCI Group meeting, as well as my research on Cloud Computing including articles on RightScale, Mosso, Amazon AWS, and GoGrid.

Lastly, I’ve got some portfolio additions that will appear in What I’ve Done section in the coming weeks.

Posted in: Blogs, Personal | No Comments »

January 15th, 2009

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In an attempt to create a community around web payment security professionals and PCI Compliance, I’ve decided to co-found the Bay Area Security Professionals / PCIUG [formal name might change].  The first gathering is Friday Jan 23, 2009 and will be less formal (meet-up style) to determine the future of the group.  It’s free, just register here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=phKV5pOXQ70lhTuYQz2bkSg and show up here:

Gordon Biersch
2 Harrison Street
San Francicso, CA
Jan. 23rd 2009 @ 7pm

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact myself @brianjeremy or @sfoak via Twitter.

Posted in: PCI Compliance, Security | No Comments »

January 11th, 2009

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I’ve got an article on Mosso, AWS, AWS Console, and RightScale I’ve been diligently working on, hence the radio silence on recent posts to my blog.  It will be finalized the week of Jan 12th, so please sit tight — maybe get some sun in the meantime.

Posted in: Cloud Computing | No Comments »

January 10th, 2009

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While, doing some sunday cleaning (massive shredding of old documents) I found what I believe to be the funniest note I’ve ever received regarding client work.  This email was sent to me after the 2003 launch of samadams.com by JUXT Interactive.  Prior to shredding this, I want to make sure the memory is kept alive:

“To whom it may concern,

I am intending to dress up as Sam Adams (not the historical Samuel Adams but the character associated with your beer). I was wondering if you could provide a description or list of his attire as I would like to try to assemble the best costume possible. Thanks for entertaining this rather whimsical request.

(name redacted)
  

You can view the case study on samadams.com in my portfolio: http://www.brianjeremy.com/what-ive-done/samuel-adams/

Posted in: Humor, Personal, Work | No Comments »

January 5th, 2009

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Well, I guess its official the blog authority of the Interweb has determined that I am a geek — brianjeremy.com is now officially syndicated at http://geeks.alltop.com/.  It’s a shame my last post was about art — I’ll kick the technology posts back into high gear.  Welcome new readers.

Posted in: Alltop, Industry | No Comments »

December 30th, 2008

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Well, I’ve been writing so much lately about technology I thought I’d take a break and mention I’ve got two new pieces of art in my collection. They are both limited edition Shepard Fairey (Obey Giant) prints that were sent out as holiday gifts. Peace Fingers Red was given to friends, family, and vendors in 2006 an edition of 200. Peace Tree Yellow was again given as a gift in 2007 and is an edition of 350.  Both prints are 18×24, signed, numbered, and extremely rare.  Peace Fingers and Peace Tree both exist as standard prints, but the gift editions have variations which make them unique.

Posted in: Artwork, Personal | 1 Comment »

December 29th, 2008

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A quick how-to guide on installing MySQL Server on Apple OS X 10.5.5:

1. Download the correct disk image for your flavor of OS X.
2. Open the image and notice two packages, click the one “mysql-5.0.xx-osx-10.5-x86.pkg
3. Follow the installation wizard (choose the installation location, click next, etc).
4. In the disk image you’ll see a file MySQL.prefPane — double click this file, it will install to your system preferences.
5. Now in system preferences you’ll see an icon/name pair “MySQL” — click this once to open the configuration settings. Click ‘Start Server’, this will boot up the server*.

** Lastly, if you wish the server to start each time you reboot click the checkbox “Automatically start MySQL at Startup.” Lastly, if you wish the server to start each time you reboot click the checkbox “Automatically start MySQL at Startup.”

Thats it, you are ready to roll. Use your favorite MySQL management GUI to connect to the local database or simple use the ‘mysql’ command from a terminal window. Don’t forget to initially set your root password.

Posted in: Databases | 1 Comment »

December 19th, 2008

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Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site which appear as a pseudo sub-navigation in the search results. Sites have no control if/when Google will generate these sitelinks directing users to content, or what links it will choose (surely I would have selected others).  Well I just noticed that Google has created some sitelinks for my blog www.brianjeremy.com.  What’s interesting is that not only have I confused others, but I have confused google too regarding my name.  If you google ‘Brian Jeremy’ (my first and middle name) you will see the sitelinks displayed below, however if you google my actual  name ‘Brian Kupetz’ you won’t see any such sitelinks.  Maybe in the near future Google will determine we are one in the same.

Posted in: Google Webmaster Tools, Personal, SEO, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

December 18th, 2008

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Let me preface this article by stating that I initially began using reinvigorate as an analytics tool in 2003.  This was much before Urchin became popular and was later purchased by Google and turned into Google Analytics which these days is the de-facto standard for most applications.  Reinvigorate is an application thats been under sole development from Sean McNamara for six years and has gone through many different phases and iterations.

Currently a new and revolutionary version of reinvigorate is under beta testing again and will released in the near future alongside a tandem product called Snoop.  Snoop is a desktop application with both Windows and OS X versions.  Snoop runs in the system tray or status bar (depending on your operating system) and instantly notifies you of a new visitor or interaction with your site.  As seen in the screenshots below Snoop allows you to identify the visitor’s session, IP Address, the current page they are viewing, as well as the referrer and custom fields.

Snoop is not a replacement for reinvigorate’s web-based analytics suite which is one of the most robust and feature-rich on the market.  So don’t be fooled this project hasn’t moved away from the origins of web page analysis, instead it is now integrated into your operating system and coupled with an additional desktop application.

Key Features

• Custom Events – Using basic Javascript you can create an unlimited amount of custom events.  For example, if you are interested determining when a visitor signs up on your mailing list, or purchases a specific product you can easily integrate the tracking of these events and view them as they occur.  All events have the option to trigger audible sounds, however if you are analyzing a high trafficked site you likely won’t need the audible notification enabled as it will sound like your best friend ringing your door bell non-stop at 4 am to kidnap you and fly you to Las Vegas for a bachelor party.
• Name Tags – If your site requires users to login and authenticate you can seamlessly capture this data using  simple Javascript code similar to the Custom Events so this information can be included in the data collection process.  Basically not only can you analyze how visitors use your site, you can actually identify those visitors for more specific trend analysis. 
• Real-time Notification – As it has been since day one reinvigorate has been a product that collects and reports data in real-time.  It doesn’t sweep your web logs each night to see how many visitors stopped by yesterday and let you know what pages they viewed and for how long.  Everything is revealed to you in real-time as it happens.  Think of Snoop as as the stock market of web analytics.

If you aren’t already excited about how powerful this product is, you should be.  Knowing Sean there will be even more features included prior to the public release.  Follow me on Twitter (@brianjeremy) or register to be included in the Beta to learn more about the product or to be notified when the final public release is available.

Below you will find a few screen shots of the new OS X and Web Interfaces.

As a footnote, I should probably give a mention of (MT) Media Temple who has been an infrastructure supporter of reinvigorate since its inception.

Posted in: Analytics, Marketing | 2 Comments »