Terry's Worklog

While I was looking through my web stats the other day, I realized that for the first time, I was able to get a rough look at how often MarcEdit gets utilized during a normal day.  A few months ago, I added the capability for MarcEdit to automatically check for updates.  This has been really well received (and has made management of new releases much easier) – but one of the unintended side affects, is that when that version check occurs, a hit gets generated on the web server.  While I don’t have direct access to my log files (thanks to University policy) – I can get rough hit counts on specific files, coupled with reports on unique users and a nifty little map that shows the country where hits were generated.  And while it’s not a tremendous amount of information, it’s very cool to have just that.  I’ve always been able to see how often the program gets downloaded (just over 10k times monthly) – but now can get a rough idea of usage as well.  Looking at the last two days (March 22 and 23rd) – MarcEdit was utilized by 2,351 unique users, across 59 countries.  This surprises me – and is slightly humbling – to think that this many users have found and trust MarcEdit to help them with their daily work.  It also helps me to validate the work that has gone into the development of this application.  I’ve worked on MarcEdit publicly for nearly 10 years now, and have had the opportunity to meet and work with hundreds of individuals because of it.  It’s always been my sincere hope that MarcEdit would be/and will continue to be helpful to the library community – and I’d like to think that it has been.

Couple of other fun MarcEdit facts:

• Lines of Code to the MarcEdit.exe application (UI code primarily): 55,116 lines
• Lines of Code in the MARCEngine (including translations):  17,092
• Total Lines of Code to the MarcEdit application/Libraries (minus ancillary tools):  574,271 lines of code
• Total lines (including ancillaries): ~700,000 lines

Thanks folks,

–TR

First, a big thank you to folks that sent me feedback on the new Task Automation tool. I’ve taken that feedback and put together an update to address some of the usability questions. Changes made for this update:

1. Ability to clone existing tasks
2. Ability to rename tasks
3. Ability to reorder tasks
4. Ability to Edit Task steps
5. Bug Fix: Regular Expressions in tasks were being escaped and not processing correctly. This has been fixed.
6. MarcEditor – Tools Menu. New option added as a child to assigned Tasks – this allows users not only see tasks with associated shortcuts – but also see and run any defined task.
7. Export Settings – a new little function found on the main window, under file – that allows users to export their user settings. This will package items together for re-import into MarcEdit. This function is useful when users wish to share configuration files, tasks, macros, etc. between machines.
8. Import Settings – imports a settings package back into MarcEdit. When you import settings – these overwrite your existing configuration settings. So, if you import tasks, macros, XSLT functions – these will replace any locally defined functions.
9. There were a handful of UI changes primarily to the task window.

I’ve added a couple of additional tutorials to YouTube to address the changes mentioned in this update. Links to these:

1. MarcEdit Task Automation Maintenance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnorN0MFFN0
2. MarcEdit: Exporting local Settings to another computer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR8pcpQ8IUs
3. MarcEdit: Importing settings to your local computer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=248dgSgHlmg

As always, updates can be found at:

• MSI Installer (Windows): MarcEdit_Setup.msi
• Zip File (Windows/Mac/Linux): marcedit.zip

–TR