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.

Bonnie, who I studied with in Scotland, is visiting with her friend Yael until Tuesday! We went to Cafe Besalu, the Ballard Farmers’ Market, and then got lost trying to get to the Mac and Jack’s brewery for the tour. So we saw parts of Redmond that are not worth seeing really.  Then we came back, ate at the Good Fries Place, and walked around the Locks and salmon ladder for a bit. Finally rounded things off with watching an episode of Real Housewives of New Jersey and deciding that one lady strongly resembles Jafar.

Real Housewife of New Jersey

Jafar from Aladdin

=

Today was my 2nd to last day at the Burke, and I got the final mock-up of new Ethnology landing pages done, as well as an analytics report on Mammals of Washington.  Ethnology curator & co. seemed to like the mock-ups, but they also seemed to forget that change is good. And the user is not like me. Etc. Hopefully it gets implemented in the near future but who knows. Tonight I finally visited Molly Moon’s ice cream in Wallingford, which I highly recommend now. Birthday cake flavored ice cream is the bomb.  Also The Grok is going to hopefully write a post about analytics for non-profits thanks to our Twitter messaging. Yay!

So in my continuing quest to figure out new ways to visualize data, I came across this article through The Grok, (which I realize is from 2007) in Smashing Magazine on new and interesting approaches to data visualization.  I tested some of them out and I wanted to share and post pictures of the results (though some are better when in action than still).

1. Amaztype.  These people utilize Amazon Web Services to make a word of your choice based on book/album/dvd covers. You can sort of see the graphic design trends that people follow. I especially like that Goodnight Moon made it onto the Night visualization.
   

   Night

   

   Light

2. Death of the Pie Chart.  Using pixels instead of pie charts to demonstrate relative size. I like it.
   

   Pixel graphs

3. We Feel Fine.  This site does amazing things to get a sense of how the world is doing by “harvesting feelings from weblogs.” You can filter based on feeling, gender, age, weather, location, and date for 6 different ways of viewing the data. I tried out Madness, Montage, Murmurs and Mobs.
   

   Filtered Madness by the feeling "sad", possibly about Michael Jackson.

   

   An image from Montage.

4. Websites as graphs.  Graphs by the HTML code, so tables, links, images, etc. get different colored nodes. I made a graph of this site but I didn’t think it looked too interesting.
5. Book/essay word visualization.  A German Interaction Design Institute wanted to show the connection between words and ideas better and made an awesome sort of Venn diagram. One pretty much includes everything that I learned at the iSchool, and some extra German words tossed in.
   

   Visualization of words in an interaction design text.

6. The Shape of Song.  Graphical representations of music. I did one for Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat.
   

   Visualization of Nocturne in E flat.

7. Visual Complexity.  The mother lode of data visualization, a large gallery of different types. I was really fascinated by the transportation ones.  The ones I’m showing here are of the global internet distribution and the blogosphere from “inspirer” radiating to “inspiree.”
   

   Global internet distribution

   

   Blogosphere from inspirer in the center radiating to inspiree.