Seasonal update

A few little bits of news about everyone, this site and stuff generally. Not that most of you need to pay attention.

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Highlight follow nofollow

Sometimes it's good to know when a link is rel="follow", rel="nofollow" or rel="external" (or somewhere in-between)

While there are a number of ways of doing this (some that are much simpler) I prefer a simple userContent.css hack.

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Mystery

I need someone's help to understand what this is/means:

It may be the wrong way around.

I'll keep the context vague right now to allow me to verify any ideas.

mail me : bob dot mitchell at scl dot com

thank you.

Yellow

At eight o'clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn't feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash.

Click to enlarge.

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WAW - October

Last night was the 10th Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) event to be managed and sponsored by SCL Analytics. The event was co-sponsored by Coremetrics who also provided the use of their user conference venue.

Over 250 people registered and a 180 people turned-up on the night.

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Marketing DNA

Yesterday I visited my friends at the University of Southampton - to talk about the promotion and content of the web analytics component of their Building Customer Insight course.

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Pagerank five

Months and months ago I thought I'd spend a little time promoting my site so that I started to rank well in the search engines for my own name.

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Bochum

A few days in Germany - in the delightfully dull City of Bochum.

Here is the view from my hotel room (photo stitched together from sketchy Blackberry photos)

Click to enlarge.

The ongoing search for Good Steak took me to 'Steakhaus El Toro' - who's Argentinian steaks didn't disappoint.

(despite the seats being covered in hairy cow hides)

Ameritard

You will notice that I tend not to post about being away from home until I come back. At least you may have done.

The week before last I had been been over to the USA, first in New York and then Chicago. In each case accompanied by the project manager from The Customer.

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Blackberry Bold

Typically I will announce a new toy with the title of 'New Toy' or 'New Addition'. For my new Blackberry Bold I've stopped doing that.

It arrived yesterday, courtesy of the lovely Barbara a Vodafone who ordered it as an upgrade from my Blackberry pearl. Unfortunately I wasn't able to play with it since yesterday as I was out (See Cooked Spire and Rain).

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Keyword frequency

A long time ago, in land far far away my friend and, at the time, colleague, Matt created a little flash tool to split text or list of keyphrases into individual keywords.

I needed a little keyphrase something that did the same thing, but more hackable and much faster. In hindsight JavaScript was an odd choice, but it seems to work okay, even on stupid inputs.

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Axis change

There is a very simple trick that, while obvious once you know it is something that may not be obvious at first.

Many reports, not just from web analytics products look like this:

Click to enlarge.

In this case we are looking at a 'Most Frequent Referrers' report, with a classic bar chart. Don't worry about the data (it happens to be from this site), what I want you to pay attention to is the chart and how pointless it is.

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bad day

Occasionally people ask me is bob is having a bad day. Well this page aims to answer that question.

On any given day bob may be having a bad day, but on the whole most days aren't too bad.

To answer the question fully you should look to the following for guidance:

• Is Bob working on a project that is already running late
• Has Bob had sufficient tea coffee today
• Has Bob had enough sleep - lack of sleep may simply be due to too much work, being woken-up by some combination of Linus, Gabriel and/or Asa
• Does bob have to do something that he really doesn't want to do today? This may include, but not be limited to, answering stupid questions, writing documentation or filling-in expenses claims

If you have any doubt about the above, you may find it useful to ask and maintain some sort of score.

Having a bad day isn't just limited to just the above, it could be that he just doesn't want to be nice to you.

At some point, this 'is bob having a bad day' page may be more useful - but not for now.

AVG Response

AVG is doing some interesting things. I think that my own perceptions of what they are up to are biased by my own interest in web analytics - after all, regular users of the software really don't care what their AV is doing.

Useragent filtering

The web analytics platform that I am most used to is Unica Affinium NetInsight, both in the on-premise (and possibily logfile based) and on-demand (hosted, and thus most likely to be JavaScript pagetag based) versions.

Due to the logfile-based nature (at least historically) of NetInsight it has always had the need to filter out Robots/Spiders, monitoring agents and all sorts of other garbage that litters the data. As such it's trivial to segment away or exclude the current AVG useragent, either in your own installation or, with a brief request to the on-demand team, from your hosted install.

Of course, this is already broken - AVG already seem to be altering the useragent string to something that looks completely real, and thus impossible to block all by itself.

Understanding AVG

The main thing that I would like to know about right now is the sort of environment that AVG presents to JavaScript - what sort of screen resolution, locale, plugin list, cookies etc.

If the above presents a recognisable fingerprint it would then be possible to filter based on these multiple criteria.

Of course, it may be the case that it presents the actual environment of the host, which would make things much harder to work with, although I don't think that this is likely to be the case.

How AVG executes

JavaScript pagetags typically create the URL that they are going to request from a complex block of code. I propose (and I stand to be corrected, as AV isn't my thing) there are four main options for how AVG can function.

• Static analysis of the JavaScript
• Sandboxed execution of JavaScript
• Sandboxed execution of JavaScript that allows the tag to 'fire' to the outside world
• Actual execution of JavaScript

Now - I don't *think* it's doing static analysis, although I have colleagues that know about such things - I'll have a word on Monday.

I hope (for the sake of AVG) that it isn't executing the code for real - that would open-up the opportunity for malicious exploitation - although we may be able to exploit it ourselves. :-)

Which leaves some form of sandbox. This should be easy enough to implement as JavaScript runs in one anyway. AVG would just need a separate instance. The real question is what does the sandbox provide for an environment and how is it allowed to interact with the rest of the world - at least we know that it allows extra requests to be made.

References - further reading

http://www.grisoft.com/ww.72

http://www.grisoft.com/ww.faq.num-1066#faq_1066

http://www.grisoft.com/ww.faq.num-1188#faq_1188

Disclaimer

All this is pure speculation, but it almost makes me want to sign-up to see what it does.

All for now. Comments/thoughts via usual channels

Link Visualisation

I have been having a thought - something to do with visualising the relationships between sites/blogs/posts/pages.

Clearly others have gone before me, I rather like:

http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html, http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/ and http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html for various reasons.

None of these quite do the job that I need - so if I'm going to create something myself I need some:

• network visualisation, including some de-cluttering algorithms
• site indexer (perhaps using web analytics data)
• source of link information for links going in the other direction

To be fancy this could all be done in 3D, but I'm not sure it would be any more useful than something in 2D.

And then I'll become fabulously rich.

Very Exciting

This isn't really the post where I apologies for not posting, but as I was writing the subject I found myself thinking about that sort of thing.

Anyhow - I have been playing with Twitter this evening - figuring out if there is anything in it for me.

Up until this point I have followed (stalked) people via the RSS version of their feed - but now I am using the traditional route.

You will see at the bottom of the right-hand menu on my site a little 'Latest Twitter' thing, which in a eating-its-own-tail sense should also show the auto-added-to-twitter items whenever I post something.

Let's see how this plays-out.

Cornwall Holiday

Earlier this year we all had a lovely holiday in Cornwall. We stayed in a yurt (provided by Plan-it Earth) and went to see some nice places.

About our yurt

Living in the yurt

Web Analytics Reading List

Blogs

This is a quick list of worthwhile blogs to help in getting and keeping up-to-date in the world of web analytics. (Checked and revised December 2009)

Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Lies, Damned Lies... (Ian Thomas)

Multichannel Marketing Metrics with Akin

Eric T. Peterson

Matt Belkin

Official Google Analytics Blog

June Dershewitz on Web Analytics

And not forgetting:

bob-o-rama analytics feed

Forums

WAA Web Analytics Forum (Yahoo! groups)

Books

If you want something that you can read on the train or hold in your hand then these may be of interest.

(Yes - I'll make a small affiliate fee if you buy via one of these links)

Multichannel Marketing

So, Akin has written (and had published) a book on his favourite subject; Multichannel Marketing and how to effectively measure and optimise it.

From Akins site:

This book’s aim is to provide a missing key for unlocking the most anticipated marketing strategies of our days. Namely: Integrated Marketing Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success.

Why? Because customer-centricity has become more challenging than ever!

The rise of “customer-centric marketing” (where the customer, not the product or marketing campaign, is the focus) places a premium on marketers having a deep understanding of their customers. Yet, just as companies were beginning to figure out how to turn “customer-centricity” into reality, the goal posts for achieving it have been moved further away.

For crying out loud! As if it had been easy earlier! What is to blame for the new hurdle?

It is the multichannel revolution, i.e. the constant birth of new avenues for interacting with companies and their marketing messages, especially online. While many marketers are still stunned with the plethora of new channels that have sprung up in recent years, customers have long since integrated them into their relationships. Therefore, customer-centricity now asks of marketers the ability to understand customer relationships that span online and offline channels.

Multichannel metrics are the missing key for overcoming the Online-Offline chasm

Without overcoming the chasm between multiple channels, marketers cannot understand true ROI of their marketing initiatives, will miss opportunities for improving their results, and will certainly fail to achieve customer-centricity. This book aims to provide the key for overcoming the chasm, namely practical methods for integrating marketing metrics and actions across online and offline channels.

Buy it from Amazon.co.uk:

Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for on and Offline Success

Littleham and Landcross

Okay - this is just a little post about Littleham and Landcross - Littleham where I grew up and Landcross which is nearby.

Here is a little picture of a lane - notice the high banks and overhanging trees that just-about reach the middle:

...and here is a slightly more scenic view across the valley to the other site (where there is another pointless Devon village:

Let's see if anyone reads this tiny little post about Littleham and Landcross.

Sunny Sunday

So, two weeks ago we had snow in Crawley. This weekend was lovely and sunny. Full-on lawnmower weather.

To mark the occasion I had taken some seasonal pictures (mostly as inspirational computer wallpaper). In monster 1920x1200px I think these turned-out the best:

Click to enlarge.

And here is the unscaled original.

WAW - March

This is not really a review of Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) that was held in London on Monday 31st March 2008. The revised date was to allow our special guest speaker, Mr Eric T. Peterson.

Yes, this is stupidly late, but out of completeness I still feel compelled to post. Besides, these images have been sitting on my desktop for the past weeks and I need to do something with them

Mr Peterson spoke on the subject of the 'Future of Web Analytics'. His presentation was both entertaining and insightful.

Here is the 'official' March WAW round-up post. Unfortunately there was one picture missing:

Here is Mr Wayne Byrne on the left with his eyes almost shut. Dr Alan Hall (with his eyes shut) in the middle and myself, sporting open eyes and my stupid attempt at a beard.

The beard competition that I was sort-of competing in was started by the web team of a customer of ours - they will be playing this until the end of May, but I had to quit early.

The next London WAW will be on the 20th of May (a Tuesday - designed to interact with e-metrics).

Crawley Snow

This snow is a bit like buses. Not in the sense that it is in any way big, red, or capable of carrying sixty-two passengers.

A couple of weekends ago it was snowing as well and, as it's been snowing this weekend as well then that makes it like a bus.... in the sense that two snowy days came close together... like buses.

Never mind.

We (well mostly Claire and Linus - I was nice and warm indoors) made a snowman and our Christmas tree started looking a little more sensible out there in our front garden:

Just to prove that we really did have some proper snowage here are a couple more as evidence, the first taken overlooking our nearby playing-fields:

And another looking down the road:

Ha!

Virus

After last weekend and the awful pain I was rather glad that, by Monday morning I was feeling pretty-much better again. My hands were a bit unresponsive for a couple of days - which made typing a bit of a chore, but otherwise I've been fine.

With no further symptoms, I assume that it was some form of passing virus that I am now rid of.

I am sure that this a relief to everyone.

Virus?

Just to save you asking, this is a picture, heavily mutilated, of a virus.

For the past few days I've had the strangest feeling in all my muscles.

They hurt to move, they seem to be weaker.

Things I can't really do :

• pick up a tiny little baby
• squeeze my toothpaste out without using two hands (even then it's a struggle) (the tube is nearly new)
• pick-up a full kettle
• type. (other than with two fingers, moving my whole hands)
• walk up/down the stairs without a bunch of pain

Otherwise I feel fine. Nose/throat/eyes are fine. My mind is as sharp/crisp as ever.

I am hoping that this is just an odd virus / post-viral thing. If it isn't then I'm getting very scared.

Snowy Sunday

So then, other than rambling messages sent in the early hours of the morning while on a bus in Iceland I haven't been doing a lot.

Today it has been snowing a little bit in Crawley. This was the view from the back of our house this morning :

This is as good as it had got - other than coming back home earlier when there was enough snow on the car left over from being parked in Handcross for Linus to make a snowball with. He wasted this by throwing it at the house. (edit: three snowballs! one for the house, one for the front-door and one for the christmas tree)

I have been writing some utilities for SGD - if I mention them now then it may motivate me to post back with something later.

untitled

Last night passed without further interest, I slept well - nothing to moan about.

The company here is just as I remember it - although web analytics isn't going to just 'happen' for them. They have to realise that the need to use WA as a tool and that they will need to drive its use.

I didn't bring a coat with me, but it's damned cold out there - bright sunshine but still about minus one, worse when the wind blows. I just went to look for a coat, but didn't see anything that I liked, other than the thought of having one to match the one I brought back for Linus the last time I was here.

My drink is nice.

Reykjavik again

I find myself in Iceland again - arriving at the same late hour as last time, except this time it's properly dark. This is a dumb excuse to try writing an entry for my site using my 'phone. So far it seems to work.

The Flybus, as it's called, is a smelly old bus that should eventually take me to my hotel, I costs 1300ISK, which at today's rate is just a bit more than a tenner, slightly cheaper than my thirty-five quid return ticket between Gatwick and Heathrow this afternoon.

The ride out of Keflavik, which was originally a US airbase, is quite smooth, ape far we still have the lights of the airport around us, the smelly coach isn't that full, most people on the flight seemed to be locals, so I would guess that they mostly have better ways home.

Toyota, Subway... Familiar names shine-out from the left, while to our right is nothing but a thousand miles of darkness. I don't think I'm exaggerating.

Here they drive on the right. Not that it matters, the road is empty.

And now it's dark to our left as well. The darkness of another few thousand miles, this time over water. Could be worse, they could have put a drive-through McDonald's out here.

...

I forgot to mention, but, you know how when you land at an airport and it smells funny, like Edinburgh airport always smells of cow poo? Well, landing here, it smells slightly of rotten fish. Which is nice. Don't worry, you seem to get used to it very quickly. I wonder if that smell is 'real' in any meaningful sense?

...

The coach is warm. Too warm. I know that it's only about 1 degree c out there, but this seems to be over-compensating a little.

All of this road is lit with sodium street lights. I guess it would be a dangerous road, but it seems silly somehow. I can't help but think of all the unlit motorway in the UK. The light of the street lights illuminates just a little of the landscape to either side.

Oooo! Proper lights. Are we nearly there yet?

First drop-off. Two guys that have clearly left a car somewhere odd. Just noticed, although the roads are clear and dry, there is a bunch of snow by the roadside. The odd monochrome light makes it kinda hard to see what's what.

Nesti, KFC, N1, Snogg.

Hotel can't be far now.

Red roadside sign says minus three degrees. Chilly.

My Firefox Add-ons

This is a simple list of the Firefox extensions that I always end-up installing, mostly to keep them all in one place so that I can add them easily to a new installation or profile (mmmmm, is there an extension that would do that for me?)

AdBlock Plus

All-in-One Sidebar Quick access to bookmarks, history and Feed Sidebar (see below)

British English Dictionary - Somewhere on Dictionaries

Feed Sidebar Simple - but effective.

Firebug tracing of much of the details of each page rendered - essential at work, sometimes useful at home.

Live PageRank Not heavyweight SEO, but good as a general indicator.

Web Developer Mostly work, but useful at home. Access to cookies, enabling and disabling specific page elements of functionality.

Location Navigator viewing sequences of pages/images outside the constraints of site navigation.

OpenBook tag new bookmarks with keywords as the bookmark is being made.

Search Engines for Wikipedia and LinkedIn.

All of which co-exist nicely and should work on Windows and Linux.

The following I tend to add to my userChrome.css file to remove the text on personal toolbar icons and squish them all together.

/* Kill bookmark text in the Personal Toolbar */ toolbarbutton.bookmark-item > .toolbarbutton-text { display: none !important; } /* Shrink gaps between icons in Personal Toolbar */ toolbarbutton.bookmark-item > .toolbarbutton-icon { border: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; }

which makes things much nicer in both Firefox 2.x and 3.x

Opening cdrzip

Just spent the best part of a hundred quid on a check-up visit to the dentist and a few x-rays.

Thankfully my teeth are mostly all fine, although they did notice some gum recession (that isn't a great thing apparently)

Anyway, as the xrays are all digital (with the coolest little xray camera that they put in your mouth to take the picture) and, of course, I asked if I could have a copy.

Usually I would object to personal information being passed, unencrypted over the internet, but I don't think there was anything too sensitive the file.

Anyway the file that he sent me was called :

34BD93C9.CDRZIP

(one or two characters of the filename changed to protect the guilty)

Mmmmm... ZIP, I wonder if that's just simply compressed? 7-Zip does the job nicely (right-click, 'extract to')

We are left with a folder containing :

1,822 DICOMDIR 578,914 Image10 578,914 Image11 5,594 ViewSet1 4 File(s) 1,165,244 bytes

Of course, I start with the images. Thankfully, using GIMP (you can download the Windows version of GIMP from gimp-win.sourceforge.net, and specifying the 'open...' type as DICOM (although you will need to view 'all files' as the image files don't have extensions) and you're left with a nice pretty picture. I just saved them as JPEG and the results are here :

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

The other two files are a binary mush, with waaaay too much personal info to post here, but I'm sure that the DICOM website and their interesting looking ftp site may be of use.

SEO Book review

Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day - a book by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin. This is based on the 2006 edition of the book. As I write this I can see that there is a 2008 version due in a couple of months that will probably improve on some of the points that I mention.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website, typically using natural (non paid) methods.

I acquired this book in the office as part of a pattern of background reading hoping to acquire come cool/new knowledge and to a certain extent I wasn't disappointed.

The book presents a methodology that would allow a time-constrained person to take a poorly performing website and turn it around into something more successful.

I am sure that the general techniques presented could be fitted onto a single side of A4 paper, but the arguments, examples and explanations make each point crystal clear.

Examples of strictly white-hat methods are made throughout, with pointers to common pitfalls that search engines may perceive as black-hat methods that an inexperienced SEO'er may fall into

The introduction to the use of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) as a viable alternative to, or in conjunction with more 'organic'/'natural' methods is important; and while this isn't 'typical' SEO, it's a sensible way to top-up traffic when other methods are under performing.

From a web analytics standpoint, some space was given to Google Analytics, with a few mentions of other products. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - especially when doing analytics 'properly' is pretty-much a full-time job in its own right.

For myself, having most of the methods described to most of the sites that I'm responsible for already in-play the most useful aspect was the methodology. Detailed record keeping, measurements before and after making changes (duh!) as well as 'selling' your efforts within an organization will be of most use.

All in all, this can either be a cheap, quick read, with information that may come as common-sense to many or, when used as a workbook over a course of months, add real value to online efforts.

Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day

Flower Wallpaper

This afternoon we had a lovely walk to the park - Linus http://www.linusm.com/ rode his scooter and we spent a nice little while playing.

On the way back I took this picture that I have decided to use as my wallpaper on my PC for the time being.

Click to enlarge.

Behind this thumbnail you will find the original high-resolution version from the camera. If you find yourself unable to create a version of this at a specific resolution then let me know and I'll see what I can do.

I release both the thumbnail and the original image under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. To find out more please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/uk/

You may also be interested in Blackberry Bold flower wallpaper.

Day from Hell

You may notice that the URL of this post is '/2008/day-from-hell'..... this means that I can have other sucky days, but not until next year.

The plan

- Wake up at 0600 - get ready and finish packing and leave the house by 0700-0730.

- Arrive at customer site in Bracknell before 0900h

- spend day with customer

- nice night in hotel in bracknell

- another nice day with customer

- back home

- more customer stuff later in the week.

Easy. Non?

Life

- Wake up at 0700h (not that bad)

- leave house at about 0800h

- have car shudder to a halt on the motorway (M23 - northbound, just before the M25)

- Get nice chap from Just Mechanics to come and rescue me in his tow-truck

- Back to the office by 1000h

- spend day working remote for the customer

- attempt to book hire car from Garage - not possible due to insurance madness.

- contact several hire-car places which could do me a people-carrier, or get me anything I liked, but not now and not anywhere near Crawley.

- travel to Gatwick Airport and get hire car from there.

- Drive to customer in Bracknell - arriving at 1730h

Oh and my shoelace broke.

The day finally ended at about midnight and I was tucked-up in my squishy hotel bed by one.

uklinux sucks

So - I have finally managed to leave uklinux. It has taken since October (it's now nearly February) to move two simple domains from them (they use tucows/opensrs) to another outfit that can host the domain names (just DNS not the sites themselves) who also happen to use opensrs.

Why would I want to do this? Well, I was paying for hosting that I didn't need (not their problem, but it was a prerequisite to have a couple of domains) and they never ever answered any emails (seems that they were actively blocking them without bouncing).

They have been running the same scummy version of php and mysql for years.

They broke and didn't fix the phpmyadmin interface (thus making it practically impossible to manage the database)

I can say this now, as I have finally broken free - they can't break my stuff any more! (I think)

Geoff (respect!) actually managed to sort the problem out and allow the domain transfers to take place, but despite many many promises I never received a call back from Lance.

Now, I can't be *too* hard on Lance, as he is responsible for much of what CentOS is today, and I use CentOS on a daily basis - but I just wish he'd returned just one 'phone call.

End rant. More updates to this site, and to the sites of Linus and Gabriel should follow.