Blog

To provide some structure to this site, I will over time be organising my posts into a number of “books”. Each book will be an ordered collection of posts linked to from a master contents page. I’ll use this master page as a place to park ideas for future posts and to ensure comprehensive coverage. [...]

  Calcatraz Quick Start Guide Calcatraz is a free online calculator which offers both basic calculation functionality and more advanced features. This quick start guide gives an overview of some of the things you can do with Calcatraz. Introduction Note: Calcatraz is very new and is still limited in what it can do. However, it [...]

I’ve just implemented currency conversions in the calculator. The rates are updated daily (thanks to Ask Flib for the pointer to suitable data sources). The basic format for carrying out a currency conversion in Calcatraz is to use the three letter country code as in: 10 GBP in USD However, Calcatraz will also accept a [...]

Calcatraz the online calculator now shows workings for the calculations it performs. To view the working for a particular calculation, just enter a calculation into Calcatraz and then click on the ‘Show Working’ button at the bottom right of the answer box, as shown: This will cause the answer box to expand and the working [...]

I’m currently working to improve the range of conversions which can be handled by Calcatraz. Calcatraz now implements the following length / distance conversions: 1 angstrom = 10e-10 metres 1 astronomical unit = 149 597 870 690 metres 1 attometer = 1.0e-18 metres 1 bohr = 5.2918e-11 metres 1 centimeter = 0.01 metres 1 cubit [...]

One thing that became quickly obvious when Calcatraz launched was that the site had a high bounce rate. At 70% it seemed to be fairly average for an unoptimised site. But it meant that for every ten people who visited the site, only 3 were actually sticking around. I decided to try and reduce the [...]

Calcatraz,  the free online calculator, is live. Launched onto the web two weeks ago, Calcatraz has already been provided answers to thousands of queries. It is a calculator which provides a number of useful features including a complete history of calculations and the ability to create rules which extend the capabilities of the calculator and [...]