I did end-to-end development of this app, from database design, import and management tool, web service and two Adobe Flex applications.

Working in close coorperation with Redbike Multimedia and Pim Reinders from ReclameArsenaal, I think we achieved a really nice result.

Have a look at http://bit.ly/dt1Xan to see nearly 100 years of Dutch advertisement history.

I have now updated it, so that it works with air 2 beta2.

Download FlexrTracer

Features:

• Filtering of keywords
• Autodetection of flashlog.exe
• Color highlighting of strings

Installation instructions:

• Download the above ZIP file. and unzip it with you favorite unzipper
• Install the .EXE air app
• Copy tail.exe to the installation directory (normally c:/program files/LogReader/

I thought it would be good to try some other language than good old PHP or actionscript. Although haXe and Actionscript  are closely related, there are several differences. haXe offers some very nice language elements, which make it better in than actionscript in a lot of respects. First of all types are a bit different and haXe has stronger type enforcing, for function types for example.

I was missing the good old actionscript eventlisteners and timer implementation. I managed to write a few classes to implement basic event handlers. No event bubbling, no canceling of propagation, but apart from that fully functional dispatchers and listeners.

For the timer, just use it more or less like an as3 timer as in the example below (note no TimerEvents).

var timer:HaxeTimer = new HaxeTimer(100, 10);

 timer.addEventListener(new HaxeEvent(HaxeEvent.TIMER), timerHandler);

 function timerHandler(e:HaxeEvent):Void{
trace(e.target.currentCount);

// DoStuff

}

You can find a link to the package below. The code is now in no way optimized for dispatchers with listeners for many different events. I think the listeners should be placed in different arrays according to event type, to make notifying quicker.

Download the events package

Please let me know if you have any code suggestions or if you spot any bugs.

The basic code for this script are four lines of codes, looped for each line section, with a max of 2 * PI or 360°.

_r = ((2 + Math.cos((q * i) / p)));

x = _r * tr * Math.cos(i);
y = Math.sin((q * i) / p);
z = _r * tr * Math.sin(i);

The x, y and z values can be drawn using the graphics class after we convert them to 2D points.

Some interesting results can be achieved when the number of line segments is lowered below 100, making the image really distorted. With 35 line segments and high p and q values things get interesting.

Do you monitor the visitors on your website thorougly enough? Do you know who your visitors really are? Even if you have plenty of visitors on your corporate website, chances are you are not maximizing the potential value they represent. I am sure you use tools to track traffic on your website, but how well do you really know the visitors on your website?

You will probably have plenty of quantitative information about traffic. Maybe you know which browser your visitors are using and which operating system. You know if your visitors are Mac users and what size screens they have. What exactly does this information tell you? Is it enough to filter out potential leads from your visitors and does that tell you if you are reaching your target audience?

It might be, but if you do direct sales through your website, or if your website is meant to generate sales leads which need to be followed up, the chances are you are missing out on business opportunities. In this case you really want to get to know your visitors and actively engage with them.

How does it work?

As part of their three step plan to engage with web visitors and generate leads, we built an application for webleadsb2b to acquire more qualitative information about website traffic. The requirements were to get specific in-depth information to:

• Monitor campaigns
• Get the name of the organization visiting
• Know their geographic location up to city level
• Filter out competitors from the visitors
• Measure on target audience
• Find out where visitors come from

How we did it

We designed and built a tracking script in Javascript and a front end dashboard application using Adobe Flex. Adobe Flex was chosen, because of the quick development times, it’s XML support and cross browser capabilities.

This rich internet application features graphs, copyable Excel like data grids and drag and drop functionality for data. This makes the application intuitive to use and data is easy to export. All data connectivity is done asynchronous, making the application more responsive and safer than an average web application.

Results

Fiserv, a financial services provider, uses this application to monitor campaigns. They can for example track the clicks on web ads and drill down on what type of visitors clicked on them. They found out that out of every 100 clicks:

• 85 % was non-commercial
• 5% were competitors
• 10% was their target audience

With this data they were able to calculate the effectiveness of their campaigns much more precisely.

In the next two posts I will get into how you can capture even more lead data and how to effectively follow up leads.

Webleadsb2b sells this product as part of their lead generation solution. If you want analyze the traffic on your website better or if you want to be able to monitor your campaigns, the team at www.webleadsb2b.com can help you out.

To present the material he is gathering on his travels, he contacted Flexr Web Solutions to develop a website for him. Together with him we developed the aquabrowser like navigation for the website. This navigation links the various posts in a spiderweb like fashion to allow the user to browse the information present on the site.

The resulting website www.thedaywesurrender.com is fully AJAX driven with an advanced history manager. The brosing part is made in Adobe Flex. To allow Antonio to update his website with ease and because of its SEO capabilities, we used Wordpress as a content management system.

Visit the website at http://www.thedaywesurrender.com

Customers can combine this data with the data gathered through web marketing systems to target new leads with pin point accuracy. This is a system that pays for itself.

Please use the contact page to find out more about this product.

Click on the image to open the demo in a new window.

An external company (Pictura) is hired to scan the magazines and is using OCR software to extract the text out of the material. They will deliver the scanned material to Flexr Web Solutions. With the custom import wizard the customer can easily import the pages to the database. For every new magazine that is imported, the customer will be asked to insert meta data such as publication date, issue number etc.

Apart from a backend management system we are developing a frontend user interface and a webservice. When finished this will be implemented in the website www.reclamearsenaal.nl. This rich internet application is being built in Adobe Flex and makes it possible to deeplink in the material and to search in all of the 80.000 pages in the archives.

Of course we are very excited to build this comprehensive system. When finished this will be one of the most advanced and responsive systems to search in back issues of magazines and books.

For more information about digitizing archives, magazines and back-issues please contact Flexr Web Solutions.

To promote this website, we made an animation which shows you how to reach the top while swopping items online. You have the possibility to upload your own picture and use it in the animation. When you are happy with your picture in the animation, you can send it to your friends to watch, as a viral marketing tool.

The goal of the marketing campaign is to get more items on the swopping website. For the person who uploads most items, there will be the reward of an IPod Touch!

Visit the campaign website at www.swopjetop.nl and upload your picture now! Let me know what you think after you’re done.