"Keep a count of anything you want for whatever you want." New from Mike Stenhouse: simple, one-click counters for keeping track of things. Might give this a crack.

"I find the watchclock fascinating not simply because it’s a kind of steampunk GPS, a wind-up mechanical location-awareness technology. I’m further fascinated at how this holistic system of watchclocks, keys, guards, and supervisors succeeded so completely in creating a method of behavioral control such that a human being’s movements can be precisely planned and executed, hour after hour and night after night, with such a high degree of reliability that almost a century goes by before anyone thinks of ways of improving the system as originally conceived." Fantastic.

"Everything breaks, so what happens when we wire the world on the sort of massive scale being proposed and every day is more irritating than the next? Probably what will happen is that people will just walk away from the entire project damning it first with market insignificance and if that doesn't work then rendering it meaningless with government regulation. It's worth at least talking about." Aaron is awesome.

This might come in handy sometime.

A nice approach to doing some of the typical monitoring you'd want to do with Google Analytics, eg monitoring PDF downloads. I'm not totally convinced by some of his syntax, but the functionality is good, and the regex trick is nice.

"Why did Weight Watchers work so well? For a really fascinating reason: because it isn't a normal diet. It's something more. Something fun. It's an RPG." Of course. Fantastic deconstruction from Clive Thompson.

"I wanted to generate some visualizations of our project’s growth, so I decided to put together a little shell script that looked at the output from git log to spit out some metrics." Ooh, nice one, Carlos!

"As you may have guessed, we’ve solved these problems, and replaced the Exception Notifier in most of the apps we manage, with a homegrown solution called hoptoad." Gosh, the Thoughtbot guys really are on fire.

"metrics, data management, and usability for online games" - awesome blog discovery of the day. Just looks fab. Insta-subscribe!

This kind of thing always amuses me - clouding real data by making ghost-queries as background noise.

Good analysis of the situation, and ev's right: pageviews pretty much *are* obsolete...

Always useful to know: how long loops take in different browsers Javascript interpretations.