Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path talks up analytics. Don't I feel like a smart guy with all my fancy analytics experience?
That's probably something I don't talk enough about here- analytics. I've got a ton of experience with both Omniture and Google Analytics, doing some pretty advanced work. I should share that.
Anyway, good article talking about the UX benefits of analytics data. Check it out.
This is a little resource page from one of the WordCamp Boston Ingite talks. Wordpress Short Codes are clearly awesome and I don't use them enough. I aim to change that.
Here are the numbers for DrunkenFist.com in the year 2009. There were 614,333 visits to that domain last year and the top browsers broke down like this:
There's a back story to this one. I once failed to get video progress tracking working with a Flash video player and Big Expensive Analytics Company™ code. It was a real pain in the ass. We missed the deadline, wasted about 8 hours and eventually just dropped the feature. A frustrating experience for all involved.
With that in mind, then, it should come to no surprise that I returned to the problem when exploring the <video> element and related APIs. What was a fruitless 8 hours of hoping the Big Expensive Analytics Company™ code would "just work," turned out to be about 30 minutes of light hacking to get it up and running with Google Analytics and HTML5.
By the way, between you and me the Big Expensive Analytics Company™ code never "just works," even though that kind of feature is one of the reasons they get the big bucks for their product. I don't really like working with Big Expensive Analytics Company™. I'm much happier with GA. It behaves as expected and is a lot easier to "get" right out of the box.
An older (2007) article, but still pretty interesting. I've been slowing working my way through some HTML5 stuff. This was part of that effort. If, like me, you're fascinated by where the web is going*, you should definitely check the article out.
With event tracking open to everyone we've been going nuts with them at work. I've also been going nuts with them at home.
I'm basically smothered in event tracking.
I'm glad to have it. It saves me from doing non-standard stuff (faking page views) and it saves our analytics analyst the time of having to filter out fake page views from the data.
While I've been messing with "real" fonts on the web using Cufon, it's still a hell of a lot easier to just use old school fonts. The referenced article does a great job of pointing out some neglected fonts that might come in handy on a project.
Attaching an event handler to the document and then delegating based on the target has been on my mind a lot recently. I like the idea and it's actually come up in two code reviews this week as an alternative to traditional event handling.
Serendipitous then, that Nicholas Zakas decided to write it up so that I have something fresh to point to when I reference the technique.
*I'm also fascinated by where the web is and where the web has been, so I'm not really picky on those fronts.
The following is a handy list of the things I'm currently thinking about and/or working with as well as a few things that are coming up around the bend. I'll do this kind of thing from time to time. Mental housekeeping.
But, if you've got any interest in SEO, then this discussion of the