There is no secret that websites without ads look much cleaner and better. And a few dollars is not worth bothering you with. So from now on, my website will be ad free, and will only contain content I want to show you, my reader.

On another note, Mine Searcher Free 1.2 is now available in the App Store. Check it out. It’s free.

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.

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.

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.

- @thomassnielsen

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.

Tomorrow morning I will travel to Bergen, and sign a rental contract for a new appartment. This will be my first time living alone, so it will be very exciting. I hope to start moving in by the end of the week.

I will miss Trondheim, but I am also exited to learn more about Bergen and to meet new people.

I will also start at a new job 17. August, so I have a lot of time to get settled before then. I will use my spare time with my girlfriend, decorating the apartment, or working on my new secret website project.

That is all for now. Will try to update as often as possible. I am probably going to spend some time traveling, so I should have no problem updating quite often in the next days.

Healthy stuff

Cheap, good, healthy food
This morning I figured I should Google around after some cheap meals, since I will be relocating to Bergen by the end of this week if everything goes as planed. What I found was really inspiring, and I figured that I should try to document my best meals here.

I will be taking pictures and adding the recipe whenever I make something I like. This will be cheap-but-good meals, and hopefully quite healthy also. I might not start with this immediately, since I will be eating a lot of easy meals while I get settled in.

Some of the links I found (norwegian): link 1, link 2, link 3

If you have any other tips, please feel free to add a comment.

A new website project
I am also working on a new website, which should be ready in about 4 months when it is done. For now it is secret, but I might be adding some beta-keys here

Back to reality
Now it is about time I get back to practicing for my IT apprentice exam tomorrow. If all goes well I will be traveling to Bergen Wednesday morning, towards a new apartment, a new job and much closer to my beautiful girlfriend.