Web Consulting Washington DC

Blackberry, the productivity killer

Mickey Panayiotakis — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:39:22 +0000

sent from you blackberry?

About a year ago, I was sitting next to a business executive type on a plane back to DC. As soon as we touched down, he brought out his blackberry and started feverishly tapping at it. Someone asked him about the blackberry, and he confidently exclaimed that it’s made him 25% more productive, or some such. So I said to myself, Hold your horses, there, skippy!

Now, I don’t know the guy. He may have data to support his claim. But let’s break this down. His grand claim means that in an average 10 hour workday, his blackberry allows him to reclaim 2.5 hours for other tasks. What does he do on his blackberry that gives him that time back, that would be done less efficiently without the blackberry? Email is a lot clunkier to type on a blackberry, so it can’t be it. Most people claim that they can get rid of email quicker since they check it on a blackberry while not at the office, and act on it, freeing up on-computer time. And it’s fair to assume that this guy may have a one-hour commute each way. Hopefully he has someone driving him around too, because I know none of us are so dangerous to reply to email on the blackberry while driving. Then, there’s meetings. You can of course check your email in the middle of a meeting. Speaking of efficiency, if your meeting is so trivial that you use it to check your email on your blackberry, wouldn’t it be more productive to not have the meeting in the first place? Or do you think your lunch buddy really enjoys watching you check your email?

I’ll tackle a few other points in a bit. I, like many of us these days, look at efficiency and productivity as it relates to our full lives: our work, of course, but also our hobbies, our personal time, our family. The blackberry and similar devices has, for better or worse, erased the work/personal lines that used to exist at 0900 and 1700 every day. I check email at home, at the restaurant, while I volunteer…If I’m not efficient in these places, I’m not efficient at work either. Spending 2 hours working at home after dinner does not mean I am 2 hours more efficient.

So let’s move to item 2. I’ve done a little informal survey of people I know who get their email delivered to their mobile device. All of them, me included, always read the email, but usually postpone a response until they get home. (Most emails don’t, or shouldn’t, require a simple answer.) Then when they get at their computer, they have to re-read the email, but also look for it because it’s no longer marked as “new”. So let’s review this process:

On the blackberry:

Read the email
think about how to reply
act on it: usually decide to reply later.

Then at the computer:

find the email (it’s no longer “New”)
Read the email
think about what to say
act (usually reply, then file the email)

Here’s a worse, but more common example:

On the blackberry:

check email
read email
reply that you’re at lunch and will reply later

At the computer:

remember to check the email again, since now it’s marked as “replied” so it falls into that nebulous email category of things you’ve acted on but are still on your inbox
read email
act (reply)

In the meantime, the sender gets a completely pointless email from you that says “hey, I just got your message, thanks!”. Sure, there’s a half percent chance that the email did not make it through and I didn’t get a bounce. But really, do we need more emails floating in our inboxes saying simply “OK, got it!”? Interestingly, we don’t do this at our computer. Almost every email i’ve received saying “I got this, and will look at it later” come from blackberries! So now the blackberry user has duplicated the process, and the original email sender has to open,read,act on two emails from you, not one.

This latter bit assumes, of course, that the blackberry will remember that the email that shows up a “replied” on his desktop requires additional action. Processes that rely on “remember” scare me.

Of course, there’s still a reason to have email on your mobile, otherwise why would anyone use it? Here are my rules for keeping blackberry email productive, for both you and the other party.

Check email when you have time

If you’re just checking email to check email, you usually end up checking it again later. There are plenty of times in our lives when we’re simply waiting. At the airport, the DMV…you get the idea. Then there are times when we just think we are waiting idly when we are in fact just bored with the task at hand; sadly, too often that task is driving.

If you don’t have time…

If you often find yourself idle for short periods of time, try adding a context to your to-do list for tasks that can be completed within a short time. Perhaps even an “@mobile” context. When’s the last time you called your mother? Maybe read the newspaper for once? Or go through those emails that have sat in your inbox for the past year, and file them. You haven’t done anything with them for a year: face it, you’re not about to start. Perhaps that short email reply you’re about to send would be better handled with that other thing your blackberry can do: call a friend.

Take the time for each reply

Speaking of time… Nobody wants to read your one-word email. If you’re in a rush and find yourself typing in shortened words and complete disregard for grammar, stop. Someone took the time to send you an email. Extend the courtesy and take the time yourself. If someone did not take the time to send you a well-written email, then show them the errors of their way but taking the time yourself. Further, short half-sentence answers are often ambiguous.

Read, Think, Act

Every time you open an email, your tasks are to read it, think about it, and act on it. If you haven’t completed all three items, mark the item Unread so you can tackle it later. If you Acted on it, then file it somewhere else. A clean inbox is a happy inbox. A lot of times, the action will be to add the item to a to-do list.

Cold-turkey

Finally, if you’re addicted to blackberry email, consider getting a second email address for your blackberry only, only for important communications. If someone needs to reach you asap, they can email you on your blackberry. (Heaven forbid we call someone on the phone these days!)

These rules apply for your computer email as well as your blackberry email. For additional inbox-related productivity-fu, check out 43 folders series, Inbox Zero. Anyone have any other thoughts or productivity ideas? Leave a comment!

Oh, and on the meta side, with this post we introduce yet another new category, following on the heels of the “productivity” category: “wall of shame”. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to add to it!

AOL openID provider down

Mickey Panayiotakis — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:17:39 +0000

OpenID

21 October 2008

As of 1400 EDT, AOL’s openID provider, openid.aol.com, is down.

For better or worse, I use openID. For worse or better, I use aol.com. The reason is simple: When I started checking out openID, AOL had an openID provider that gave every AIM account an openID account. (If you have an AIM account your openID URL is http://openid.aol.com/aimusername ).

Things have been peachy. I have a single way to log in to many places, including all the 37Signals products, many blogs, Wikis, etc.

Except for today. It seems my openID provider is down, as is presumably every other AOL openid account. DNS does not resolve. Which means now I can’t log into any of these sites.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I could bypass openID, wait for my non-openID account pasword to get emailed to me, etc. But the bottom line is I can’t log in.

This brings up some questions about relying on openID. Admittedly, I’ve not had an issue with this so far. However, it may be nice to have some work-around. For now I’ll wait and see. More as this develops.

Impact

In pure numbers, this potentially affects the more than 63 million AIM users, assuming they all use openID. If only 10% use this feature, that’s still over 6 million users. The frustrating thing here is that there is no “status” page or other way to find out the current status of the provider.

Federal Contractor Misconduct Database Upgraded to Top 100 Bad Boys

Ernesto Gluecksmann — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:15:55 +0000

Federal Contractor Misconduct Database

Mandy at Project On For Government Oversight couldn’t wait to share on POGO’s blog about tomorrow’s official release, so neither could we.

“So we’ve been teasing you about the upcoming re-release and updating of POGO’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database. While we’re officially releasing it tomorrow, since the President just signed the FY 2009 Defense Authorization Act creating a government-wide (though not publicly available) database of information regarding the integrity and performance of federal contractors and grantees, we couldn’t help but share the fact that it’s AVAILABLE NOW.”

Tsk. Tsk. Bad federal contractors!

This upgrade contains 50 more federal contractors that have gotten themselves into trouble. In addition, there are some layout improvements and a new sort by Enforcement Agency feature.

So how much have the 100 had to pay for their bad deeds since 1995?

Grand Total of $23.6 Billion

Yes, thats 23… BILLION… with a B.

Interruptions waste $650 billion per year

Mickey Panayiotakis — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 01:04:01 +0000

I came upon this article in the New York Times when doing research for a blog post. I figured, what better way to introduce a new “productivity” category? These are some astonishing figures:

the cost of unnecessary interruptions is $650 billion per year

This is mostly mundane matters, in large part dealing with email, IM, SMS, etc. The majority of the cost is in the time it takes to get back to work

28% of a workday is spent in interruptions

For those familiar with Stephen Covey’s quadrant, this is in the “Not Important, Not Urgent” category. Another 20% is spent in meetings (though whether these are important or ugent is not addressed), and part of 25% is spent writing “productive” emails. This is almost 3 hours in a 10 hour workday.
On the email side, new terms are hitting the street such as “email apnea” (the condition of holding your breath when you realize you have 300 new emails), and “email bankruptcy” (where you have so many emails you have to delete your inbox and try again.) Gmail recently added a “take a break” feature in Gmail, which locks you out of your mail for 15 minutes.

In light of this, I’ve decided to add a few more things to my list of email productivity.

Pick up the phone

This is an easy one. Instead of exchanging 15 emails between 3 people to figure out a good time to schedule that meeting, pick up the phone and ask, how’s 2pm friday? Then send one email out that verifies the meeting is at 2pm friday.

Reply to one

Catch yourself wearing out that “reply to all” button? Try the one next to it. You know the one I mean: the one that won’t spam everyone else. If everyone else needs to know the outcome of your conversation with Nancy, then summarize it after you’re done and send them an update. Hopefully after they read it, they’ll resist the urge to say “thanks” and…

Reply to none

Aggressively reduce email by passively not responding. If you’re planning on just saying “got it!”, skip it.

Let them wait.

I’m guilty as charged: My email app is running all the time. As soon I see a new message, I stop what I’m doing as if the fate of the world depends on me checking that one email. That’s bad. I should only be checking email every few hours, for a few minutes.

Separate your to-do list from your email. When you’re done with a task, go back to your to-do list for your next task. If that next task is “check email”, then check email. And, to eat my own dogfood, I just changed my “Check email every…” setting to 1 hour. And shut off my email app.

And, in case any of you are still doing it…

Do NOT forward that spam to 5 other people!

It won’t bring you happiness. It will bring you eternal animosity from your friends.

Got anything else? leave a comment.

So you got a Mac!

Mickey Panayiotakis — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:22:01 +0000

OS X

A few months ago I got another call from a friend, giddy as a schoolgirl, telling me they got a Mac. I’m not sure what it is about these machines: It’s not like switching from Honda to Volkswagen. People who get their first Mac act like their life just changed: their first baby may have just been born but they’re asking me what to do to their Mac. They’re teenagers again, who just bought their first car. Freaks. (Or was I the same way back in the last ice age when I got my first mac?) No matter. This is not a social studies course. I get questions about “what to do first” on a new Mac, so I’ll address them here.

But first a correction. People seem to “switch” to mac these days. I’m personally not keen on that word choice. ”Switch” implies a fairly dramatic (if not major) change. You switch a light off or on going from darkness to light or vice versa, for example. I’m guessing the Apple marketing geniuses love this idea that you’re putting something behind you, switching to something new and exciting. But I think it’s more of a shift. Like shifting from 2nd to 3rd: you’re still driving the same car on the same road, but you’re moving better now. Apple goes to lengths to remind us that we can now run Windows on a Mac, so even when you’re switching, you don’t have to, really. Parenthetically, I know only few people who run Windows on their Mac, and they have specific requirements such as server software that require Internet Explorer. Even Windows devotees will tell you not to run IE but I’ll again leave this philosophical tangent for a later time, like after a few martinis at Old Ebbitt.

One last thing by way of introduction: this is not purely an entry-level “top ten” list on how to use the Mac. There are plenty of these. I’m assuming most of you have some, even minimal familiarity with OS X by now, have installed the software updates (your Mac will have told you to anyway), and are able to use Safari to get to this article. If you don’t, follow along anyway…but if you are not yet comfortable with a one-button mouse, I suggest browsing Apples Mac 101.

Now on to step 2.

Security

Macs are safe enough out of the box, but it makes sense to do a few things to make things more secure, especially as phishing schemes don’t discriminate. The first thing you should do is create an Administrator account, and make sure your default account is not an Administrator. Don’t worry: the system will ask you for the Administrator account credentials if it needs administrative access, without forcing you to log out and log back in. Removing administrative privileges from your default user account means that any malware can, at most, only gain access to your user files. The overall system will remain uncompromised, and you can log in as the administrator user to fix any problems. One caveat: A few applications don’t like being installed as a non-administrator user and don’t warn you to the fact. I’ve found only one to date.

From the Apple menu, select System Preferences
Select Accounts
Add a new account. You can name it whatever you want (”Admin” works for me), and give it a secure password
select “allow user to administer this computer”
Select your default user
De-select “allow user to administer this computer”

If a picture is worth 1000 words, a 30-second video at 32fps is close to a million, so here’s a quick screen cast on how to add an administrative user.

When you’re away…

The mice may play. There’s one or two more security steps while you’re in the System Preferences. Click on the Security preference pane. Choose the following options:

Selected: Require password to wake his computer from sleep
Selected: Disable automatic login
Not selected: Log out after X minutes of inactivity

You would think that it’s more secure to log out if you’re not going to be around for a while. This however presents a problem: If you have multiple tabs open on some applications, or if you have unsaved documents, the logout process will hang while a pop-up asks you if you really want to quit the application with unsaved changes. Eventually, the application will cancel the logout process. My Security Preference Pane looks like this:

Security Preference pane

While you’re here, you may turn on your Firewall, if you want. For the really paranoid of you, Apple has published a 240 page security document.

Movies

A lot of Internet movies are in WMV format. Sadly, Macs don’t support the WMV format by default. Don’t despair! Install Flip4Mac. Microsoft makes this preference pane/Quicktime component that allows you to view WMV movies right in Safari or Firefox.

Text and MS Office compatibility

You have basically three options here:

MS Office for the mac (Available in several editions. It’s still Microsoft after all.)
iWork
OpenOffice

A quick few notes on pros and cons to help you decide. MS Office is the most expensive, and the most compatible with the MS Office suite. If you use advanced functions of Office suite products regularly, then it’s worth springing for the Office suite.

iWork gives you about 80-90% of the functionality and compatibility. The vast majority of people will be happy exchanging documents between Office and iWork. Further, iWork comes with templates to make your documents really stand out.

OpenOffice is, as the name implies, Open Source. That means free. Free as in Free Beer, and also free as in Free Speech. Most people familiar with Office can get around OpenOffice just fine, and compatibility is better than iWork. On the other hand, the interface is a little clunky. But did I mention it’s free?

Back up…several times a day

I have to get personal here. I love Time Machine. I’ll tell you a story. (Some people don’t tell stories anymore. They share stories. So be it.) Better yet, I’ll let you read about it, since I hate repeating myself. You can’t know how much I hate repeating myself. I hate repeating myself more than…well, I just hate repeating myself. But I have a second story: Today I accidentally deleted a contact from my address book. What’s a guy to do? Bring them back, that’s what. Go to Time Machine and restore. So, get yourself a Time Capsule, or if you have a desktop, get yourself a 500GB drive from your local Best Buy, plug it in, and back up. you won’t even know it’s there, until you need it.

Other stuff

Here are some other things to get you going:

Spanning Sync will let you sync your iCal calendars with Google Calendars, which you can then sync with your PDA/phone wirelessly through GSync
The Omni Group has an impressive suite of applications. I use OmniFocus on a daily basis, and OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner several times a week.
Get a fancy signature in Mail.app
“Act without Doing” with Quicksilver. This takes some getting used to, but when you do you can’t do without it.
iAlertU sounds an alarm and takes a picture if someone tries to steal our laptop. Neat.

Lastly, a little vignette that took me a couple of hours of pulling my hair out. I have several email addresses, and want to be able to select which one appears in my From: line. At first glance, this seemed impossible in Mail.app. In fact, the solution is so simple it’s hiding in plain site: On your Mail.app Accounts settings, in the “Email Address” setting, enter as many addresses as you want, separated by commas.

That should be enough to get you started. Questions? Comments? Something I missed? Got a favorite Mac app/hint? Please leave a comment.

Website Designers, Google Wants To Be Your Browser Too

Ernesto Gluecksmann — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:37:23 +0000

Google Chrome

Today on Google’s Blog, it was announced that Google will launch in 100 countries a brand spankin’ new browser and it’s called…
drum roll please…

Google Chrome

Aw yeah! Aren’t we all excited? Well for us website designers in DC, well at least this one that is, not so much.

“So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.”

Lets translate the subtext - we’re doing this here at Google, because we can. We own the world’s largest market share in online search services, lets get the last mile going with a spiffy browser.

“We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.”

Well, it is interesting to note that they making all of their code open source. We’ll see how this plays out. In the meantime, here’s yet another browser us web guys are going to have to test for… and surely there will be bugs.

Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser

Make your iPhone and your Microsoft Exchange account play together

Ernesto Gluecksmann — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:28:11 +0000

iPhone

Recently, some of our clients that love their iPhones have been having some difficulties making them sync up with Microsoft Exchange so here is a simple step-by-step to configure their devices.

We provide an excellent Microsoft Exchange Hosting & Wireless Synching service for small businesses. It is a fully enabled Microsoft Exchange Shared Hosting service that allows small business owners to purchase only what they need (per account), avoid the hassles and expense of managing their own Microsoft Exchange server locally.

How to configure your iPhone to work with your Microsoft Exchange account

Before you begin

Add Account

Enable ActiveSync on the mailbox on your Exchange server
IGT customers, just log into your Control Panel, select Wireless Email and Active Sync, or give us a call for assistance, 301.996.4646
For everyone else, you will need to contact your Exchange administrator.
Download iPhone V.2.0 Update via iTunes
You can view your current version by selecting Settings on your Home screen, then select General and then About.
Add any Contacts you have on your iPhone to your Outlook/Exchange
Add any Calendar events you have on your iPhone to your Outlook/Exchange

Now your need to configure your iPhone

iPhone Configuration

On your iPhone, select Settings, then ‘Mail, Contacts, Calendars’ and then select Add Account
Enter Email: type in your complete email address
Enter Username: type in your username in the following format: domain\username
For IGT customers, you can find this information in Control Panel, Mailboxes, select your email address then the Advanced tab.
For everyone else, your Exchange administrator needs to provide this information.
Enter Password: type in your password for your Exchange account
Enter Description: type in a description for this account (i.e. office)
Done! iPhone uses Microsoft’s Autodiscovery service to figure out further server details.

But occasionally, it doesn’t!

No worries, in the event that it doesn’t, your iPhone is going to ask for it. For IGT customers, it’s located in your Control Panel, under Get Started. Select Advanced Settings, listed under Exchange Proxy Server.

Mine, looks like something like this: owa012.msoutlookonline.net

Everyone else, yes, you guessed it, contact your Exchange administrator.

After you configured your iPhone

Once everything is in place, your iPhone is going to ask you to immediately sync up with the server. All existing calendar and contact information on the device is going to be overwritten! This is why you went through the trouble of adding your Contacts and Calendar to your Outlook/Exchange account.

That’s it!

Cuil for searching?

Mickey Panayiotakis — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:24:07 +0000

Google Antimatter?

Summer 2008: in a planet called Earth, which we seem to inhabit for now, a new power seems to have taken over. A once-little search engine has rose to dominate our specie’s most vital method of communication: the Internet. No one dares compete with them. Erstwhile monoliths are courting this new entity like timid schoolgirls, and bright new start-up dream of being assimilated into this new power’s all-encompassing aura. You and I have already been assimilated. Resistance is futile. [This space for lease for your own cliché.] In case you haven’t guessed it yet, it’s Google of course. The Mater of the Search.

So, in the peak of Google’s success and popularity, in the world where we “google” things before we search for them, where Gooogle is a subject, verb, object, and all other parts of speach, what’s a mom-and-pop startup to do?

Enter Cuil, stage left. Now, I’m not sure whether their owners have any kids, but for those to whom it matters Cuil’s owners are married. (To each other). They decided to do what us normal google-fearing won’t dare do: Start a new search engine. And the Internet is abuzz.

Unlike Google (and, for both of you who don’t use google, pretty much every search engine out there) Cuild does not rely on link popularity to rank search results. Instead, results are ranked based on content relevancy: You’re searching for “blue” and a page talks a lot about “blue”? Good match. No matter how popular or unpopular it is. Groundbreaking! Innovative! Oh wait…isn’t that what we used do to, before Google came and rocked our world? Well, admittedly we should have better analysis tools today, so who knows. It may work. Let’s take it for a spin.

Cuil People

Ernesto on Cuil.com

I got this link from Ernesto, so I figured I’d search for him. As you can see below, I found some blog posts mentioning him.

The first thing I noticed is a different look. No longer a list of links…now I get three columns with descriptive text for every link and sometimes an image (but more on that later). Still about 10 results per page, though

Oh look, and there are pictures. How neat. But wait a minute…none of these pictures are Ernesto. And I see a lot of replies he left on blogs, but where’s his personal site? his Linked IN page? The same search on Google shows this blog as the second link and Ernesto’s Bigsight.org and Linkedin.com pages are next.

me on cuil

Next I decided to search for my narcissistic self. Better luck there: My LinkedIn profile and BigSight.org profile are both right on top. But wait! who’s that man looking back at me? I hope I don’t look that old, and I certainly never had so professional a photo taken of me. And if Cuil can look in the future and tell me that’s me in 15 years, then, well, you tell me what you think. Some other information about me that also shows up on Google shows up here, as does some pages that I don’t see on Google.

So I said to myself, then: “Self,” I said, “when you’re searching for Ernesto or yourself, what are you really searching for?” I thought and thought about that and decided if someone was searching for a person, they were trying to find background information and contact information. I guess both Cuil and Google succeed in that, in different ways.

cuil on cuil

I decided to get a little recursive with all this introspection and search Cuil for Cuil. Guess what? I didn’t find Cuil. I found instead French cuisine links, links about towns and villages of sligo, information about the Scottish glens. But no search engines. I also searched for “web search engines” and again I didn’t find cuil. But I did find links that reference searching the web, which of course make sense since Cuil searches the content, stupid.

Real Cuil Search

Enough abstract searching. Earlier in the day I was honestly searching on Google for an outdoor WiFi extender product I remember looking at a while back. Google had let me down, so I gave Cuil a go. At first I was disappointed: old news stories, blog posts, and reviews. When I started reading the excerpts however, the word I was looking for came up in-text: 12 times on the first page, 11 times on the second, didn’t count on the third: Meraki. Now, does this mean that Cuil was successful? On one hand, it didn’t point me to the Meraki site; on the other, I was able to find it on Cuil whereas on Google Meraki does not show up at all on the first 3 page (I didn’t go further), except as a sponsored ad. (I should have read those I guess).

Cuil’s approach vs. Google’s

Cuil’s text-analysis analysis approach seems to favor wordy sites: blogs, news, technical dissertations. In theory, this would also work well for less popular subjects whose keywords are similar to more popular ones. But why did Meraki not show up? Meraki’s website focuses more on Internet connectivity than extending your wifi signal. Their Solution is not to the problem of extending WiFi signal but rather to the problem of getting Internet to the vast number of people who aren’t connected. OK, good theory but if I search for “get the people connected through WiFI” or other meraki-tailored searches, Cuil tells me “No results because of high load”. Getting past that, I still don’t get Meraki. I also noticed that Meraki’s site is heavy on Flash. Could it be that Cuil does not index Flash files (a known problem with search engine optimization)? I searched for something else I searched earlier: “Transmission steering”. This also got me the “high load” error. Good to see the word about Cuil is getting out.

Google on the other hand does solely rank pages based on their use of keywords…rather, based on the popularity and relevancy of links to these pages: If you write about topic X and link to site Y, site Y gets more points. With this strategy, popular sites get higher rankings, which works most of the time. However if you’re searching on an esoteric subjects (transmission steering, anyone?), you get a lot of car links and transmission links and steering links and even break links…but finding transmission steering links is an exercise in patience if not outright sisyphian. A few days ago I was searching for a solution to a compatibility problem between two pieces of hardware: I instead found a lot of links to reviewers and sellers of said hardware.

Summary

Well, it seems Cuil’s servers are down for searches that are not cached, or so it appears. This means I can’t test my theory on searching for esoteric subjects on Cuil. But I’ll keep working on it for the next few days and report back. In the meantime, comment with your experiences on Cuil so we can find out where it works, where it fails, and what we can use it for. Competition is good, and someone challenging Google can’t hurt.

Hey You! Upgrade Your Google Analytics Tracker, Will Ya?

Ernesto Gluecksmann — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:47:58 +0000

Are you still using your old Google Analytics code? Well you probably should take a few minutes to upgrade to the new and improved version. There are several features that unlock when you run the new and improved “ga.js” version.

Oh yeah, what’s the new stuff got for me?

Lots of improvements. For starters, it runs faster and a smaller foot print on your webserver, your system administrator would be happy to know. But wait! There’s more… Google several of improved abilities to customize you tracking code. Ecommerce business owners in particular have a lot more customizing options made available to them when they upgrade.

Do you have PDF’s or files available for download that you could like to track? You can now track those in your reports as well!

If you have subdomains, you can also setup ga.js to track those.

You can even track users as they jump from domain to another, which interest us since we have www.infamia.com (our corporate website) and www.webconsultingdc.com (our blog), and if you have more than one website, it should interest you too.

You can also segement your visitor types into your reports. This is really important for associations in Washington DC that like to track their members seperately from non-members.

And then there’s the future: Google has said that it will support the legacy code up to a year… maybe a bit longer, but eventually they will discontinue it. You’ll see new features appear for those that have converted, why be left behind now?

Google Analytics Urching.js or Ga.js, which one do I have?

Okay, what version of Google Analytics do I run?

Easy, open your browser, pull up your website, and select View Source. PC users right click on the page and and Mac users… Mickey?

[Mickey's note for Mac users: In safari, hit command-option-U or select "View Source" from the View menu; in Firefox hit command-U or select "Page Source" from the "View" menu.]

What you’re looking for is whether you have a bit of code that has urchin.js or whether it has ga.js. The thumbnail on the right is a snippet from Google’s Migration Guide.

Alright, so how do I implement the new version?

Well, you can either contact us and we’ll do it for you. Or if you’re crafty enough replacing the code pretty straight forward. Customizing it to your business needs is another article but you can get it started. Log into your Google Analytics account, edit your website’s profile, and click on “Check Status” at the top right.

Kinda hidden, click Check Status for your website's Profile (top right)

Once you’re in there you’ll see the code at the bottom, you’ll want to copy that and replace your Legacy GA code with this new code, on every page of your website. This goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, careful not to mess up any other code within those pages. In fact, do a backup first!

Keep in mind the appropriate location for your ga.js code is at the bottom. For large websites, the best place is to put it in a dynamically referenced footer so you don’t have to keep adding the same code into every page.

With complex websites such as e-commerce websites, you may require some programming particularly if you’re interested in taking advantage of some of the customizing features available now available to. Get in touch with us, we would be delighted to help.

Blackberry (minor) Surgery

Mickey Panayiotakis — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:05:19 +0000

In the past few months my Blackberry has started misbehaving. The clickwheel has become erratic, mostly scrolling down: sometimes it will scroll down, and sometimes it won’t. Also, it wouldn’t “click”. So I decided to opt for surgery.

First job: get rid of the retaining ring. Just pry it off gently from the left, right, and bottom sides.

blackberry clickwheel extraction

Then pop out the clickwheel assembly. This can pop out (it is held in place by a small magnet) or you can gently lift it off with a small screwdriver.

The contact at the bottom looked awful. A cotton swab (that’s “q-tip” for the rest of us), some alcohol and a can of compressed air is all that’s needed to clean all around. Dab, don’t smear. Also clean the little wheels on the clickwheel assembly.

Pop things back together…and…wait? did you not keep track of the orientation? Not a big deal. The contact at the bottom of the clickwheel assembly can point up or down.

blackberry clickwheel extraction

The verdict? Not sure how well it works yet. I’ll have to give it another day or so to make sure. It scrolls better now, and I am able to click again, though perhaps the clicking is too sensitive.

Here are some more annotated pictures of the process.

Mickey