So I can’t really post on anything I’m doing, because I’m doing some troubleshooting on things, but expect posts on multi-variate optimization, a cool SEO hack for Google Analytics, and the ever growing list of data visualization tools I need to try out.  In the meantime, in case you missed it, Adobe bought Omniture today. Below is a model of Adobe’s take on how Omniture will fit into the grand scheme of things, and here is their press release.

Adobe + Omniture model

I don’t have a very strong opinion on this but I’m sure tomorrow my Google Reader feed will have a million posts on it. Everyone at ZAAZ was talking about it when we found out, but it should be interesting to see how they integrate aspects of Omniture page tagging into Dreamweaver and Flash. Hopefully it will be a good thing.

Last weekend I went to Arizona as a birthday trip. Not sure how I feel about all the malls and new-ness, but I loved the landscape, the weather (thunderstorms included), and how friendly everyone was. Some random lady at a restaurant bought our lunch for us on the first day. Didn’t leave a message, just did it. I wanted to go hiking, but I got too scared about hiking in the desert for the first time without a guide. Below are pics of Sedona and Montezuma’s Castle.

Sedona red rocks

Sedona thunderstorms

Thunder and lightning near Sedona

Montezuma's Castle

Note: feel free to ping me or leave a comment if you are having major issues!

Yesterday the event tracking on a site was not working, and someone thought it might be that I had missed a call to the ga.js file or some extra Javascript. My first thought was “This is why I hate Javascript.” That thought recurred throughout my investigation process, but I decided to save some people time and effort by posting a few things you could check before giving up and crying. My particular example was an onClick event, but the same things could apply to other situations.

1. Check the JavaScript call. So you must understand that Javascript (which I shall now write as JS) can be the best and worst scripting language. Very powerful and can do cool things like animation (and your analytics tracking), but also a pain in that you must be very careful with syntax and punctuation. One easy way to see if your JS is creating errors is by installing the Web Developer’s Toolbar in Firefox, it will show you when there are JS errors and a myriad of other useful things.
   

   Example: onclick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(“Foo”,”Bar”,”JS”);” This will be wrong because you have double quotation marks instead of apostrophes within the parentheses. So the page will read it as “pageTracker.trackEvent(” which will not do anything. Fix it like this: onclick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(‘Foo’,'Bar’,'JS’);”.

2. Is the variable actually pageTracker? In most cases, if you’re not changing the Google Analytics code that is on every page, it should be pageTracker. If the variable is named anything else, like movieTracker or pageCounter, then you need to fix the call in the onClick and change it to: onclick=”movieTracker._trackEvent(…);” This is the part of the code you want to pay attention to:
   

   try {
   var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxx-x”);
   pageTracker._trackPageview();
   } catch(err) {}

3. Where your code at? This ended up being my problem. People recommend that the GA code should be inserted at the footer of the page to not slow down the loading time of a page. The catch is, the JS file/definition of the variable pageTracker may need to be at the top of the page for _trackEvent to do its thing. If you try moving the code with the ga.js file to the head of the page, it should help. Or it helped me anyway.

As much as I hate debugging JS, I think it has really helped me to have knowledge of how it works, so if this is all kinds of confusing, try working through the W3C tutorials.

Misc.

The Grok delivers!! I was tweeting with @TheGrok and I asked if there was any way he could post about web analytics for non-profits. Brendan Regan wrote an awesomely helpful post about it. I will probably comment more about it later, but still, very cool.

And for those who use Twitter, #wa is being deprecated in favor of #measure. See Web Analytics Demystified for an explanation.

Why can I not stop making changes to the site!? Just when I was done getting things looking ok in IE, I go and change the portfolio layout to a tabbed box (which I had wanted to do for awhile, but still). So now I must deal with IE-related nonsense again. Blar. I don’t know why I torture myself like this: I looked at how it looked in Opera and there were a few minor padding issues. I will not deal with it now.

UPDATE: IE was actually an easy fix, but then I realized that the search box was messed up on the blog. 2 hours later realized it was a CSS issue where one div was too big and overlapping the sidebar so you couldn’t interact with the search box, or text, or links. Entirely my fault.

Bentley

In other news, its hard to make sure I run when the weather is blah. I think I was meant to be living in a warmer climate. I blame the Puerto Rican influence.  Also, today is the last day to hang out with my sister and her puppy Bentley.  This means I either have to wait until she’s back to see them again or I have to make the trek out to Pullman and the middle of nowhere.

Turns out that IE does not recognize the specific stylesheet unless you have it right after the normal stylesheet.  And pretty much everything worked ok once I changed that, except some of the list style types were not showing up for whatever reason. Now all of them except one are showing up correctly, and that one will have to stay looking weird in IE 7 for now.

Yesterday I saw the movie “The Proposal“, which was ok as far as rom-coms go, but mainly made me want to go hiking again and visit Alaska. Afterwards, we went to the Good Fries Place for a nice stout and fries, which makes up partially for the bad summer weather in Seattle right now.

Now I need to stop playing with the website for awhile and start learning advanced functions of Excel for ZAAZ. Today is pretty much full of graduation events, Father’s day events, and a game night. Should be fun.

The good news: IE 8 seems to retain (most) of the CSS goodness that my Firefox CSS displays.

The bad news: IE 7 is ignoring my updates to the IE-specific CSS file. More investigation needed here. Still sore from yesterday’s hike, and now wishing I had a pet chipmunk.

Also I promised I would link to Brazen Lungs, because they are a talented band worth listening to. Check it.