Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

In my previous post, I showed the graph of the visits to lowagie.com in general. I wrote that you one specific blogpost was responsible for a huge peak on March 31. This inspired me to look at the stats of the two most important pages of March. The first one is the Invoice demo page.

Every month, I post the results of the itextpdf.com site on Google Analytics, and I add the results of lowagie.com as an extra. This time, I'll do it the other way around. You'll immediately notice why:

On March 31, the number of hits doubled from about 250 to about 500. Why? Because of a single blog post in Dutch: Ondernemer tegen wil en dank that was plugged on different places.
In my next blog post, we'll analyze this page as well as the stats of another popular blog post.

Is it April fool's day yet? No? Then this must be serious ;-)
The day before yesterday, I blogged about a dog poo problem. I also wrote a mail to the official instance that is responsible for putting the counter-productive anti-poo-tiles on our sidewalk. This is the answer I received:

Hartelijk dank voor uw gedocumenteerde mail.
Het is uiteraard verboden om honden uit te laten op uw privéterrein. De Stad Gent heeft echter enkel bevoegdheden op openbaar domein.
Wij raden u aan uw poort te sluiten zodat vreemde honden zich niet op uw privéterrein kunnen ontlasten.
Op die manier bent u geïnformeerd.

Let me translate:

Het begon met een blogpostje van Jean Philip De Tender waarin de volgende vragen gesteld werden:

• Wat is het verhaal van uw bedrijf of product ?
• Stemt dat verhaal overeen met het verhaal van uw communicatie-, pr- en marketingmensen ?

Jean Philip sloot af met de zin: Benieuwd naar uw verhaal.
Nog geen week later zag ik via Twitter een oproep van stad Gent (investingent.be):

Kennen jullie enthousiaste ondernemers? Doorverwijzen naar ons mag altijd! RT appreciated. #ondernemen #Gent

Ik voelde het kriebelen en voor ik het wist had ik vier pagina's volgetikt met mijn verhaal. Op vraag van zowel Jean Philip als van investingent.be plaats ik het integraal op mijn blog.

A while ago, I found an old blog post by BVLG dating from February 2007. It reminded me that lowagie.com once had the following Alexa ranking: Rank Belgium : 7.938 - Rank worldwide : 85.706
This good ranking wasn't caused by my blog: lowagie.com used to be the home of iText back then. Unfortunately, we had a personal tragedy in 2008: our son was diagnosed with Cancer, and we didn't pay much attention to iText nor to the lowagie.com site anymore. As a result, the ranking plummeted.
Fortunately, thing are going much better since the end of 2009. I decided to move iText from lowagie.com to itextpdf.com and in 2010, I totally redesigned the web site. At the start of 2011, I defined 3 missions:

In the last few weeks, you've seen plenty of photos of the iText Offices. This is a picture of the driveway to those offices.

If you take a very close look, you'll see something that made my wife angry enough to ask me to blog about it (something that never happened before in my long history of blogging).

I was searching the web for iText, when I found the page Java et logiciel libre. To my surprise, it mentioned a version of iText that was more than 7 years old: iText 1.0.2b. I updated the information, and at the same time, I added a page about iText in French. I hope the page will be accepted.

I still can't work in the official iText office. Next week, we'll start round two of the decoration works:

The office is split in half. This is the upper half:

This is the lower half:

They'll start with the ceiling (hence the division in two). Then they'll do the walls. Finally, we'll get a new floor.

In my previous "books I've read" blogpost, I discovered I didn't succeed meeting my goal of reading at least one book each week, so I did an effort to catch up.
I continued reading the Chronicles of Narnia, and I've read the 6th (and final) nominated book for the "Little Cervantes Award":

The mission statement of the iText Companies, 1T3XT BVBA (BE) and iText Software Corp. (USA) is to:

Enable a paperless world,
pushing the limits of digital document interactivity!

That's why I really like this movie:

(For more info, go to: hetpapierisop.be.)