Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

When you work at iText, part of the job is doing iText projects and iText development, but there's more. If we want to be successful at what we do, we need to stay alert, and research all kinds of new technologies and evolutions. There's also a general rule at iText: whatever we learn, we document.
That's why I'm proud to present the following articles:

Seems like Google Analytics does some post-processing on the numbers of absolute unique visitors:

So instead of 680,775 thank you's, I only had to say thank you 680,581 times ;-)

The holidays did less damage than expected to the Alexa ranking of http://itextpdf.com

I already peeked at the Google analytics results for December, and I can already say that the expected dip between Christmas and New Year is visible, so don't expect us to break any records this month.

Jeroen, one of the iText developers working in the iText Dev Shack in Ghent, just informed me that O'Reilly published a new book about PDF:

It goes without saying that I was very curious to find out if iText was mentioned in the book, so I went to Google Books, and I queried the book for "iText":

Today I noticed a strange phenomenon when inspecting my personal Google Latitude page. I would have expected something like this:

Hurry, hurry: let's quickly take a screen shot of todays itextpdf.com ranking before it drops due to the holidays:

In the next few weeks, you can't switch channels on Belgian television without being confronted with the images of Music For Life. The pain I feel every time I see the glass house is almost physical. It reminds me too much of a hospital room in December 2008 where Inigo and Jolien were recovering from surgery.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post entitled Finally: the promise of PDF output in the new Google Analytics! Google wrote that the PDF output functionality would be "coming soon" in the new Google Analytics. There was Sparkle of hope in November, but unfortunately, we'll still waiting, and the end of the 'old' Google Analytics is near.

If I'd receive a dollar every time people say "we're using the old version of iText because we can use it without paying", I'd be a very rich man. Not only these people are talking non sense —iText is still free software, and the copyright of iText has always been owned either by me (before 2008) or my company (starting in 2008)—, they're also making a huge mistake that could damage their own business.

When my first book was released, I used to go to the local book stores in Belgium to find out if they had a copy of my book. Most of the times they didn't, so I asked them to order one because: if your book isn't on the shelve, it won't get bought. However: as "iText in Action" isn't a book for a broad audience (it's intended for developers who want to create PDF documents), not many copies were sold in the average book store (FNAC, Standaard Boekhandel,...). As it was my first book, I couldn't resist entering these stores every time I was in the neighborhood, just to say hello to my book.