Aardvark is website/service that allows you to ask and answer questions. Aardvark forwards the question and tries to find person that can answer to your question.

The idea is that you send a question to aardvark and then aardvark sends the question to all people that it thinks that they may be able to answer. Aardvark knows who is the right person using tags, friends, location and good recommendation engine.

You can use Aardvark from many different applications. One way is to use Aardvark’s official website, Twitter, email, IM or iPhone app. Every of these ways to use Aardvark are nice, but the iPhone version is almost perfect.

The reason why the iPhone application is awesome, is that it uses Push feature. And that is so far the best push application that I have seen. It also makes it very easy to ask and answer questions. It is even better than the official website.

There may be some problems at first with IM client, because you are talking to the Aardvark bot, not the actually persons. But with good in-chat documentation. It is quite fast to learn.

Does it really work? Yes, if you are not going to ask anything stupid/incredible difficult, you have good changes that you get multiple good answers/opinions. Aardvark is not going to replace google as my primary information source, but in some cases I can’t live without Aardvark.

So, I recommend to at least try it

I don’t know why, but I love also all kind of stats. It’s just fun to have dozens of data and then analyze it with graphs and pie charts. Here is list of services that gives stats from various sources. I use all of them regularly.

• Google analytics – Nice stats of the website
• Woopra – Awesome realtime website stats tracking
• Feedburner – Nice feed subscribers/reach tracking
• Webalizer – Bandwith monitor provided by my webhost
• Hlstatsx – Most of my games are source games, so the Hlstatsx generates nice stats. (Open source version)
• Etqw stats site – The official stats site
• My own script that generates graphs from official ET:QW tracker
• Steamcommunity – Steamcommunity gives gametime stats and also very detailed stats for some games (tf2,l4d)
• Tweetstats – Very clean and nice stats for twitter usage
• Twitter grader – Another cool stats tool for twitter
• Twittercounter – Get graphs from followers
• Cloc/ohcount – Some stats from my programming
• Ohloh – Stats for almost every open source project. Code analysis.
• mon.itor.us – Just pinging my site and checking that it’s up and running
• Pisg – Stats from IRC
• Last fm – All of the music I listen is listed on last.fm Also see my history/progress graph generated from last.fm stats
• Wakoopa – Wakoopa tracks what apps I use and how much.

I have recently updated this blog to work with Feedburner. This update should not affect to any subscribers. I redirected feeds to Feedburner with plugin. But if you see any problems, please send a comment.

I have also created Twitter bot that tweets every time I post new blog post. So if you don’t like to subscribe to regular RSS feed, you can subscribe to Twitter feed.

I have also updated right sidebar to show all cool feed icons.

Ego is simple app for iPhone/iPod touch that displays many stats in one simple view. Ego supports couple of web stats systems. Google analytics is maybe the most popular stats tracking tool, so it is included. But Ego also supports Squarespace, Mint, Google pagerank, Feedburner and Twitter.

Configuring application is fast and simple. Application is mostly just beautiful list of all the stats. If you have multitiple websites, Ego is perfect way to check all the sites once.

I would like to have some more stats, like graphs and pie charts, but still this application is worth of the 1.5€

If you are addicted to stats I recommend to try this app.

To see this app in action, go to Ego app’s homepage. There is nice video of the app.

In this tutorial you will learn how to do very simple twitter bot. Requirements is Linux/Mac system, but it should be possible to get this on windows.

Install python-twitter

First, you need to install python-twitter package. Installion is simple. Just download package from python-twitter’s website and follow instructions.

Lets get started

In this code we import libraries needed to get this working. First library is the twitter-python package and another is time-library for creating simple timer. We need timer for doing a loop. Commands library is needed to get output from external command. (In this case, uptime)

#!/usr/bin/python
import twitter
import time
import commands


Intializing api


api = twitter.Api(username='username', password='password')

This will intialize twitter api and create new class, api. Change username and password to your accounts details.

Tweeting something


while 1 == 1:
api.PostUpdate(getoutput('uptime'))
print(getoutput('uptime'))
time.sleep(3600)


This will generate infinite loop that will send twitter update every hour. Tweet contains output of uptime command. This also prints output to console so its easier to see what is tweeted.

I run this command inside screen, so it will run 24/7 tweeting uptime of my vps.

If you want to learn more about python-twitter I recommend to read docs on python-twitters website.

Download source code of this tutorial: twitter_bot.py