February 14th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Articles, Tutorials
Tags: actionscript, analytics, flash, google, metrics, omniture, urchin
Web analytics is a way in which individual visitor action can be easily tracked within a site, and the aggregate statistical data derived from this can often lend remarkable insights into the effectiveness of your design, how ’sticky’ your content is, and what your users are actually looking for. Unfortunately, extending this paradigm into flash has always been tricky, because it doesn’t adhere to the page-based paradigm on which most Analytics packages are built. Once a flash application or widget is loaded, the server loses most knowledge about what the user is actually doing within it.
Usually this isn’t really a problem- flash applications have not been too complex and not many people care where on the banner you clicked, just that you left the site as a result. Yet now with the strong growth of Flex and Ajax our web applications are becoming more and more complex, and marketers and usability experts are now demanding this tracking data in spite of the paradigm limitations.
If you really think about it, what we really are interested in tracking is a user action, rather than the page loads we are collecting right now, which means that the largest part of an analysts job is turning these page events into meaningful user actions, rather than interpreting those users. There’s been some attempt to set metrics to individual places within a page flow, yet nobody has yet thought to rethink the paradigm. But I digress…
Most Metrics providers have since opened their API’s enough to allow a developer to pretend like a new page refresh has occurred. While this is hardly optimal, it does allow us to track user events from inside of flash, but the fact that each provider has implemented their API a different way means that implementing metrics for each is still a string of unique problems to solve.
To that end I’ve written the Metrics package, which is intended to provide a common metrics proxy that any developer may use, which relies on a common library of connectors that can be swapped out as needed. In this article I go over the details of how to use it, and touch on how individual connectors might be written.
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January 27th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Articles
Tags: developer, selfmanagement, simplicity, singletask
The most telling thing about this article is that not five words into my first introduction, my Gmail reminder popup came up demanding attention, and my automated reflexes immediately clicked on the little window to see what the hopeful mailer wanted. The side effect? It completely derailed my train of thought I had to work myself back into it. QED.
I have had no small number of conversations with my boss about the nature of Work-Life balance. Today’s everyday wisdom says that you have to keep both your personal and professional life properly segregated if you want to lead a happy life, and yet work continues to raise it’s ugly head once I leave the office. Case and point: I’ve been in the office most of the weekend trying to complete some tasks that I was unable to complete during the week, and even now I’m having a hard time even thinking about them in such a way that I can complete them and finally go home. Frustrated, I flipped back over to my browser and read my RSS feeds to clear my head, an came across an article on multitasking that allowed me to frame the problem in a way that made some sense: It’s not the work-life balance that I need to deal with, it’s the work-work balance.
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January 20th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Articles
Tags: developer, ethics
The internet is an interesting beast. It offers privacy and anonymity, yet at the same time gives us plenty of opportunity to pull those curtains aside and become celebrities in our own right. In the world of community-shaped brands, overnight popularity and popularity as fickle as a mouse click, we are given plenty of opportunities to make a quick buck, win a quick victory, be a featured celebrity or make a quick contribution.
The only thing that seems to be tying all these things together on a consistent basis is speed. Contribution needs to be fast, results have to be instant, and if something doesn’t catch our attention within our rapidly diminishing attention span, the audience moves on to the next best thing. Things with real staying power are growing fewer and fewer, and the last thing that seems to have any kind of tenacity is reputation.
Let’s face it: Employers, clients, friends and colleagues will search for our names online, and an even sightly determined sleuth will be able to uncover a substantial amount of our history. As a result we each have to be very careful about managing our online activity, and in particular our professional reputation; Even the slightest negative comment found in a search result will raise unwanted eyebrows, and raised eyebrows mean lost interviews, bids, and job opportunities.
To that end, I’ve tried to list a few rules and guidelines that I follow. I’m hardly perfect at them, and there are exceptions for each, yet overall they are things that I’ve learned that are absolute must-haves in order to properly manage your reputation as a developer.
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