Web Consulting Washington DC

It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

Archive for May, 2007

Spam? Bah! We got it undercontrol.

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

Longtime ‘Spam King’ Charged With Fraud - washingtonpost.com

Today’s article in the post featured the high profile arrest of spammer Robert A. Soloway. This is good sign that legislatively some are trying to criminalize spam.

A couple of facts are needed to put this in context:

1) His arrest is in no way going to stop spam, it’s a drop in a bucket, oh size of Lake Michigan

2) We don’t sweat spam.

We recently launched a hosted email Outlook/Exchange solution that brings the glorious benefit of seriously curbing spam, so your Inbox doesn’t flood with messages.

3580 Spam Emails - No problem.

Have a personal email address for over 8 years, so trust that I get a lot of spam. Approximately 300+ spam messages a day. Ever since switching over to our new email system, I have seen perhaps one or two sneak into my inbox, the rest junked into a folder to be trashed a couple of weeks later. This is one of the several nice benefits of this hosted Outlook/Exchange service (i.e. my Blackberry, which wirelessly synches to with my Outlook/Exchange hasn’t downloaded one spam message).

Here’s a screenshot of my Junk folder where all my spam gets thrown in with no problem.
Screenshot of my junkmail box

Posted in Bug Killer, Must Have, Techy Stuff, Web News | No Comments »

Google Analytics: What is this /NaN thing?

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

Recently we started setting up our clients with Google Analytics. After Google’s recent upgrades to a more Ajax styled reporting GUI, we found it to be quiet the upgrade. There’s tremendous improvements in layout and flexibility, along with simplified explanations. Very easy for our customers to get in there and get around.

For one of our clients, we started to see the characters “/NaN” as one fo the pages of significant traffic, located in the Content reports. There’s no page called /NaN, it is actually a JavaScript error that means “Not a Number”.

Well, it turns out that this is usually an indication that there’s some other JavaScript on the web page that interfering with the JavaScript that is download from Google. The way to fix this, is to move Google’s code up into the <head> tag of your web page.

Google Urchin JavaScript Code

We usually add the Google Urchin code at the bottom as indicated by Google, but in this case, the second recommendation it above all other JavaScripts.

Google Urchin JavaScript Code moved

Once we did that, Google Urchin code was run first and that fixed our odd /NaN problem.

Posted in Bug Killer, Show me how!, Techy Stuff | 4 Comments »

Traveling anytime soon?

Sunday, May 27th, 2007

Here’s three sites I never leave home without checking first.

kayak.com
I start with this one. They are an aggregator of airline prices. They are not online travel agents like Orbitz, rather, they report pricing through a fantastic GUI, easy to use, and covers 250 some airlines.

Farecast.com
If you have flexiblity in your travel schedule, you may want to check this website out. It uses a modeling engine that estimates roughly when the lowest fare will likely happen in the near future. Started from a University of Washington research project, computer scientist Oren Etzioni has developed modeling engine that does pretty accurate job. Nice!

Yapta.com
Airfare prices fluctuate, and occasionally you can get a real deal if you’re there at the right moment. Once you’ve picked the an airflight and fare that you want, you can use this site to alert you to any price drops. If you already bought a ticket, go ahead an do it anyway. The real secret is that most airlines will give you a travel voucher for the difference if you tell them that you noticed that they dropped the price of your ticket.

Posted in Websites | 1 Comment »

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