Last week I started wondering how many downloads my products really had had throughout the years. Seeing that I didn’t have complete statistics over the downloads since I’ve rebuilt the sites lots of times and moved servers and such. Currently, these are the download stats from CrazyBeaver Softwares homepage:
- BeaverSFV 1.1 - 167
- CrazyBeavers YouTube Downloader 1.01 - 6
- CrazyBeavers Calendar Class 1.1 - 143
- CrazyBeavers RSS Class 1.3 - 188
- CrazyBeavers Upload Class 1.2 - 233
- CrazyBeavers Chat 1.3 - 123
- Imager Gallery 5.5 Prerelease - 1276
- CrazyBeavers Upload 2.4 - 207
- CrazyBeavers ZIP 1.0 Prerelease 3 - 69
- Imager Resizer 2.4 - 957
Looking at this it seems quite clear that Imager Gallery and Imager Resizer would be the best candidates for downloaded products. These stats are just for the past few months though but if they’ve had similar numbers since they were released during 2004-2005 it would give quite a lot of downloads. Lets elaborate a bit further though, most of my old ASP and ISAPI/COM applications are listed on HotScripts and Aspin aswell, lets look at their popularity there to the calculation.
- CrazyBeavers Calendar Class 1.1 - 5 565 views on HotScripts with 3 votes (4.33 average)
- CrazyBeavers RSS Class 1.3 - 2 175 views on HotScripts with 2 votes (5.00 average)
- Imager Gallery 5.5 Prerelease - 22 271 views on HotScripts with 74 votes (4.39 average)
- CrazyBeavers Upload 2.4 - 3 415 views on HotScripts with 15 votes (4.20 average)
- CrazyBeavers ZIP 1.0 Prerelease 3 - 651 views on HotScripts with 2 votes (5.00 average) - Listed under CGI & Perl though, wasn’t allowed in the ASP category
- Imager Resizer 2.4 - 6 246 views on HotScripts with 176 votes (4.78 average)
- Imager Gallery 5.5 Prerelease - 26 940 views on Aspin with 9 votes (5 stars)
- CrazyBeavers 2.4 - 6 147 views on Aspin with 1 votes (5 stars)
- Imager Resizer 2.4 - 17 325 views on Aspin with 37 votes (5 stars)
Now thats some numbers, over 22 000 views of Imager Gallery on HotScripts and almost 27 000 on Aspin. If we go a bit crazy and assume that a third the of people (probably it would be closer to a quarter of the people but that isn’t as fun to count with) also downloaded the script we would have 16 000 downloads of Imager Gallery there! If we then add the numbers we would have 17 000 assumed downloads which is quite a lot. Still, Imager Gallery is only the second most downloaded of my products. The true winner, and the only product which I know for sure how many times it has been downloaded, is CrazyBeavers Winamp Controller. Counting in at 25 239 downloads since January 27th, 2005 its by far the most downloaded product I ever created and one of the few that I don’t use myself!
This article was just a little ego boost for myself but it feels so damn good that people actually seem to appreciate my work enough to download it over 20 000 times!
It’s been a while now since there was a new release from CrazyBeaver Software so I thought I should make some fuzz about it and talk about it here as well.
A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked if I knew any way to save a video from YouTube onto his harddrive so he could use it in his school presentation. A quick search on google turned up few services that could download the .flv for you which was pretty neat though not enough since it would require that the schools computers could play .flv, which they can’t. My idea then was to make a simple wrapper for FFmpeg (a great open-source tool for recording and converting audio and video streams) and let him use that for conversion. The goal at this time was to make it easy for him to do this without my help in the future and maybe to let my other classmates do it as well. It worked out pretty well in the end and I now have a really neat C# wrapper for FFmpeg.exe which I hope to release some day for everyone to use. It was however not really satisfied with this, my application only did half the job, and the easy part was what was missing. I went looking around the net a bit for solutions on how to download the .flv-files from YouTube and found several ways which had their advantages and drawbacks. In the end, I borrowed a few ideas from most of them and got my own working solution for getting the .flv-files.
The result of this was the brand new CrazyBeavers YouTube Downloader which was released yesterday as version 1.0 and earlier today as 1.01 (just love the early bugs, so simple, so devastating). I’ve seen another program out there that does the same as mine but seeing the page I found it on i didn’t really want to download and run that .exe so hopefully this will be of use to more then just my class now.
With this release I also returned to NSIS (NullSoft Install System) for the installation which works a ton better then the Visual Studio setup projects I’ve used for BeaverSFV. I’ve scripted it to check for .Net 2.0 and if not it will download and install it. It also checks if the system is x86 or x64 to decide which package to get. Hopefully I’ll get around to discuss that one some day as well since it turned out really great. But until then, enjoy my new application!
Lets see now, on the 10th of June I moved into my new apartment and on the 26th of October I got my internet connection installed. Thats about four and a half month without an internet connection. About a month ago lightning struck and fried a few parts in my web server so I had to replace them, this caused the Windows 2003 installation to fail so I had to reinstall everything which took ages. Since I didn’t have an internet connection at home I decided against putting the server back in it’s original place until I could monitor it closely (and install everything properly since some parts had to be downloaded again). This led to some massive downtime for beaverblogg, crazybeavers.se, beaverpage and a few other sites of which most are restored now.
I’m currently worked up with school and some other (paid) projects but I also have lots of cool stuff coming up for CrazyBeaver Software. First of all I’ve setup my own Subversion server on which I will host most of my new projects making the source available to everyone! To start with I will be the only one who can make commits but that might change if someone shows a real interest in helping out. I’ve also setup Trac to help managing the larger projects (such as ImagerGallery.Net) by giving me a great platform for handling bug and feature requests. Hopefully I’ll have all this aswell as the new CrazyBeaver Software up and running before 1st December but since I don’t know how much I’ll need to do for school and my other projects. Keep watching this spot (maybe subscribe to my RSS feed?) for more info!
It’s been quiet around here lately. I moved to a new apartment a bit over a month ago now and won’t get an internet connection for at least another month it seems so things are going a bit slowly on the development front. I’ve managed to put together a few things though which might be of help to some.
First of all is a .Net library (and client) for working with DynDns services named DynDnsLib (and CrazyBeaversDnsUpdater for the client application) for people who want to add support for DynDns services to their applications. More information (and sourcecode via SVN) can be found at the link below.
http://beaverdnsupdater.devjavu.com/
Second up is an implementation of the Akismet (spam detecting service that WordPress and a few others use) API for .Net 2.0. It is a quite basic implementation that could be extended a bit more if someone wants to but it should be working fairly well as it is. More info (not much) and source at the link below.
http://akismetlib.devjavu.com/
None of these projects are in their final version, but both works fairly well at least. If anyone want to contribute to any of these projects then send me an email to karl.sjogren@gmail.com and tell me what you want to implement/change and I’ll consider giving you write access to the SVN repository.
When thinking about it, checking out source from an SVN repository might be a bit tricky unless you know what you are doing, maybe I should put together an article for that aswell some day if people seem to want it.
As some might know now the server that hosted all my stuff crashed a few weeks ago. I’ve now given up on getting any backups of the files or databases so I set this up from scratch on my own server (hosted out of a friends closet) retrieving the text for my articles from TheWayBackMachine. I’ll fall a bit behind on any new articles for now though since I lost my 2 most read articles and have to rewrite them now :(.
Anyway, thats the current state of business and I really hope that I’ll be able to get all articles up and running quite soon as well as a few new goodies.
