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.

Connecting JIRA to a Database

Have I mentioned I went for the $10 Jira license and am now capturing tasks and bugs for my site redesign using Atlassian bug tracking gem? I am. And not it’s connected to MySql, so no more worrying about crashes corrupting data.

Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money | Software by Rob

While I’m not sure I want any of them more than money (give me enough money and I’d shut up about a lot of things,) there are some really good points about keeping developers happy to be found in that article.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this stuff recently- the less obvious things you can do when managing technical staff to keep them happy. Which is funny, because it’s no longer my direct concern 🙂 That doesn’t make it any less interesting for the present and I can’t imagine I won’t have staff again at some point in the future.

Revised Font Stack | A Way Back

I want to use fancy fonts. You want to use fancy fonts. the problem is, while they’re actually doable right now, there’s extra complexity (not the least of which is legal complexity) with using “real” fonts on the web, so looking at old-school alternatives based on the fonts commonly installed on user’s machines is still a mighty useful thing to do.

Memory leak patterns in JavaScript

Nerd alert.

YouTube – Speed Up Your JavaScript

Here, watch it. Nick Zakas talking about making JavaScript teh fast.

One thing that I thought was really interesting was learning that Library.forEach() is 8x slower than a regular loop. It makes sense, once explained, but I’d never really thought about it before.

YUI Theater — Douglas Crockford: “Crockford on JavaScript — Volume 1: The Early Years”

More to watch:

Not a lot about JavaScript, actually, but it’s very interesting to get what amounts to a history of Computer Science that is shaped around the creation of JavaScript.

YUI Theater — Douglas Crockford: “Crockford on JavaScript — Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript”

In Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript, Douglas surveys the JavaScript language, providing a critical reading of its core features — including new features from ES5.

Facebook is Worse than AOL | Tomorrow Museum

A nice article that sums up a lot of what I don’t like about Facebook.