Freek.dev

This summer in Belgium has been a very hot one, and we're bound to have a couple more very warm weeks during the rest of summer.

I'm not the best at dealing with this kind of heat, and with the temperature inside hitting 28° C, I've been trying to get my home to cool down on a budget: I open the windows when the temperature outside is cooler than inside, and close them when it warms up. I've also noticed the sun hits the living room starting at around 7 in the morning, which means I should close the curtains right around that time to stop the tile floor from heating up.

From the start, I knew it was likely that I would forget to close the windows in time. I would need someone - or something - to remind me. I saw a talk about Google Cloud by Bram Van Damme at JSConf.be a while back, so I decided this could be a fun little project to play around with GCP.

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Brent shares a few tips on how your can interpret data from Analytics correctly.

I've been running this blog for almost three years now. I've used Google Analytics, not only to track the amount of users, but also to actively improve my blog. I'm no marketeer, just a simple developer. Today I want to share from my technical experience, how I use traffic data and react to it.

Read more [stitcher.io]

Dennis Smink wrote a nice post on how you can use our backup package to backup your application to Google Drive. He includes all steps necessary to authenticate with Google Drive.

Backups are important, period. You will be needing these once your server or server provider suddenly dies. In this tutorial I will cover how to setup Google Drive backup, with Spatie’s backup package, Googles Flysystem and Laravel.

Read more [medium.com]

Matt Stauffer wrote down his experiences with creating a simple app on Gomix, a platform to easily create node powered sites right in your browser.

Gomix is a platform that makes it absurdly easy to spin up a new app (static HTML or Node) and see it online instantly. You can also invite your friends to collaborate, and the moment you make a change in the editor, your site updates. So, at this point I'm using Gomix and Node, and Express is an easy pick.

I strongly considered using Firebase for data storage, but the Gomix team linked me to this Gomix site using Google Spreadsheets as the backing data source and I really wanted to try it out.

So we've now settled: I'll take my old HTML and JavaScript, but instead of the JavaScript loading its data from JSON files, I'll run an Express app on Gomix pulling the data from Google Spreadsheets and output its data in a JSON format. No big deal.

https://mattstauffer.co/blog/moving-tech-forward-with-gomix-express-and-google-spreadsheets

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Over at Laravel News Eric L. Barnes posted a new tutorial on how he used our Analytics package to create a list of most popular posts. Great stuff!

Here on Laravel News, I wanted to generate a list of the most popular posts for the past seven days and display the results from most popular to least popular.

To solve this problem I thought of two solutions. The first is to build my own tracking system so I could keep a count and then use it for ordering. However, that could generate a huge amount of data and it seemed like a solution that an analytics tracking service could handle.

As I was fumbling through the Google Analytics API I found a Laravel Analytics package by Spatie.be that allows you to easily retrieve data from your Google Analytics account and it seemed like the best way to solve this problem. Let’s look at how I used it to generate a list of popular posts here on Laravel News.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/09/most-popular-list-laravel-google-analytics/

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