Inventory system
Thought I would add a screenshot from my inventory system. Text is in Norwegian only for now. I will translate it if I consider uploading it somewhere.
What you are seeing is the search function, where I just performed a search with a barcode scanner (which by the way works flawlessly on Ubuntu Linux, and not at all on my XP machine at work).
Currently the inventory system has the following features:
- Add, edit and delete items
- Add, edit and delete users/owners
- Add, edit and delete owner groups (people, storage rooms, etc)
- Add, edit and delete item types (PCs, laptops, printers, etc)
- Add, edit and delete models (Dell optiplex GX280, HP 1740, Wyse S50, etc)
- Add, edit and delete conditions (In use, Discarded, In for repair, available, etc)
- Search by barcode, owner, type or model
- See statistics of number of items, owners and changes (changes are displayed for past day, week, and total)
- List all owners
- List all items
- Each item is registered with barcode, date of purchase, date of last edit, model, owner, type and condition
- Dropdown lists are used where possible/reasonable
If you are interested, please ask. If I get any response, the chance of me open sourcing it is far greater.
Finally I’ve got time to write an update. This year’s exams and Christmas preparations are over, and I’ve got some time to spare. Christmas is also a quiet time at work, which leads me to this post.
Having completed all the critical tasks and much more, I figured I could use some time to replace our inventory system. Currently we use an Access database on a PC running Windows 98 without any backup.
I figured I could do something about that quite easily. So in the past few days I’ve been programming a web-based inventory system tailored to our needs, but still expandable. I still got a couple of hours of PHP coding left before it’s done, but I feel confident that it will be up and running by tomorrow.
I plan to run the new system on a virtual machine running LAMP, and having redundant backup. Since php is not a required skill for this job, I will of course also make sure that I document it well, and make a guide on how to export an excel spreadsheet with phpmyadmin if needed.
I am still considering if I should open source it or not, we’ll have to see how it goes.
Marry Christmas (and/or other hollydays) and happy new year to you all.
Today I have been spending an hour or two trying out different techniques to spread the word about my blog. It will be interesting to see the results tomorrow. I will probably need to spend more time if I want to get on the front page of digg or something, but I just don’t have that kind of time right now.
Therefore the visitor experiment is heading towards something like “how to get most possible visitors with the least amount of extra work”, which is also useful to know, of course.
If you feel like helping, I will just like to inform you that my site is digg-proof, and can take as much traffic as you can trow at it. Feel free to try to prove otherwise 
Now I am going out for the night, so surprise me with some amazing numbers, great tweets or just silence in the meantime.
Google Analytics
The third stage of my visitor experiment is about getting statistics. I have already set up a basic stats page, but I want more info. Therefore I have now installed Google Analytics, a tool I’ve used in almost all of my previous website projects.
Google Analytics gathers a lot of important statistics for your site: Where did they find your site? What did they search for to get there through a search engine?
All of this can be used to further target your work towards sites you know give you visitors.
I will be sure to update if this information proves valuable.
