Recent Reading (Analytics, WordPress Short Codes, Jira, JavaScript Videos, Protocol Relative URLS, Facebook)

February 11th, 2010 by Rob Larsen

There's a lot of content this week, including about 5 hours of video embedded right in the page for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.

Analytics – The Usability Lab of the new decade

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.

Short Code resources

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.

I'm actually using them for the table of contents on my ongoing How To Make a Web Site series.
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While Twitter is Down…

August 6th, 2009 by Rob Larsen

I thought I'd (gently) toss some links at you:

  • I read an Introduction to sessionStorage a couple of weeks ago. I approve.

    As it stands, I'm always storing bits of data in globally accessible places (either in the DOM or in a namespaced Data object,) and I always have to document what I'm doing so having a standard place to park data is great.

    The fact that it stretches across an entire session? I love it. Especially since it's so straightforward when compared with cookies. I hate dealing with cookies. It feels like coding through a time machine. sessionStorage is much more modern. Convenience FTW.

  • Of less interest to me on a practical level was Computing with JavaScript Web Workers. It's cool, but for the stuff I do? Not immediately useful.

    Of course, now that I've said that, I'll get some computationally expensive problem and will end up using them next week or something.

  • JavaScript is represented strongly on the 30 Most Influential People In Programming list. Care to guess at the JS names included?
  • Interested in the ongoing discussion of web fonts (the embeddable, fancy kind?) one of my co-workers, Colin Henson is working on a great series outlining the whole shebang. check out: Web Fonts part 1 and Web Fonts part 2.

    We worked together on the redesign of CramerOnline.com where we used Cufon for headers, so it's very topical around the office.

    Quick verdict on Cufon, btw? Slightly tricky, but definitely ready for prime time :)

  • While I appreciate all the grassroots efforts to rid the web of Internet Explorer 6, the real way we rid ourselves of that beast lies not with us, as developers, but with IT departments where they control every piece of software on their users machines.

    It's with that in mind that the good press Windows 7 is getting should be greeted with great joy by web developers the world over. While many IT departments skipped over upgrading to Vista (I know of what I speak, we use XP at work), the lure of Windows 7 might be too much for them to ignore.

    Which would mean IE8 would get a big bump.

    And I would dance a little jig.

On My Radar This Week- Cufon, Event Tracking, Steve Souders' New Book

June 13th, 2009 by Rob Larsen

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.

One with it.

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