Four short links: 1 September 2010

Faces in R, Open Source Web Analytics, Small File Store, Building Mapper

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | Comments: 7 | September 1, 2010

R Library for Chernoff Faces — faces represent the rows of a data matrix by faces. plot.faces plots faces into a scatterplot. Interesting emotional way to visualize data, which was used to good effect (though not with this library) by BERG in Schooloscope. (via the tutorial at Flowing Data)
Piwik — GPLed web analytics package.
Pomegranate — a data store for billions of tiny files. (via the High Scalability blog interview with the creator of Pomegranate)
New Backpack Makes 3D Maps of Buildings — the backpack indoor equivalent of the Google Maps cars, from Berkeley researchers.

Andy

This new design is really bad.

Before I could see all 4 links at a glance from the home page without having to click on the article.

Now I’m forced to click on it to find out what the 4 links are.

Does anyone at O’Reilly care about usabilty?
A. Nonymous

I agree. Put the links on the front page.
DC

I agree, the new format sucks. I won’t be clicking through to see the four (but I really did enjoy scanning them on the top page for something of interest)
led

Agree with above comments. Too much form, too little function in the new redesign. Bloody ridiculous in a daily post titled ‘Four short links’ to have to click through to actually see them all!
Mike

Add me to the list of people who agree about the missing 4 links.
Allen Noren

Fixed! Thanks for the feedback.
http://dreimals.e Fabian

We replaced Google Analytics a while ago with Piwik and so far it’s performing great. Lately they released an iPhone application and there are more plugins to come. It’s a reliable solution and best of all it’s free (not free as in GA as you give all your data away).