1 minute, 26 seconds

Recently I needed a way of tracking PDF viewing on a web site. Google Analytics (GA) does a great job of tracking page views, but they require JavaScript to work. Further, a PDF download will not fire any JavaScript and is only tracked in the web server log, of which GA knows nothing about. What to do?

For starters, you could use GA’s tip: How do I track PDFs on my site? The big caveat with this technique is that the GA JavaScript takes a sec to load, and is generally best kept at the bottom of the page so the user experiences all your content loading “quickly” while the GA JavaScript can load “slowly” with no perceived slowness. Since most modern browsers are not really multi-threaded, moving the GA code to the top will give the user a slow, bad experience.

A better technique is to use JavaScript just like GA recommends, but instead of firing their page view code, fire your own in an iframe! I have a site wide JS file I use which I added this function to (JQuery required):

// way to fire a page request in hidden iframe good for
// doing Google analytic tracking for offsite links, PDFs etc.
function loadFrame(goto_url)
{
   if ($("#loaderFrame").attr("id") != undefined){
      $("#loaderFrame").attr("src",goto_url);		
   }
   return true;
}

Now on any page that I want to track PDFs, I have a link that looks like this:

   PlipBlogger

The net result is that:

1. link is clicked
2. loadFrame() gets called
3. loadFrame() sets the source of your iframe to be pdfTracker, thus loading the iframe with you PDF as it’s query string
4. the ender user sees none of this and their browser natively handles the PDF download.

On the /pdfTracker page, you would send the user’s browser a small payload include the GA JavaScript to track that this PDF was loaded. When you next got to GA you should see all your PDFs behind the /pdfTracker? URL. Handy!

0 minutes, 14 seconds

I had a an old, powered mini-usb hub that stopped working with my webcam and USB scanner. I was about to toss it when I pondered if it still would would just send power to what ever was plugged in. Sure enough, I now have a wall wart endowed charger for my first gen iPod Shuffle. Handy!

1 minute, 19 seconds

I’m a big fan of WordPress. I use it here, at plip, I use it work, and most of my friends use it, leave one. The other day, while commuting over the bay bridge, my co-worker and I were singing the praise of how easy WordPress is to use not only as a blogging platform, but also as a poor mans CMS. I’m very partial to Xaraya as an awesome, full featured, unstoppable CMS. However, what about when you have just 3 or 5 pages on your entire site? You wanna help out grandma/great uncle/distant niece with their new web site, but you want to let them edit at their whim. WordPress it!

To prove that this would be easy, I timed myself to download, configure and create a fully WordPress powered site. I didn’t do a dry run or prep any downloads or .htaccess rules. My MySQL user didn’t exist. From scratch I:

• Downloaded WordPress

  wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip

• Unzipped it
• Created the directory structure
• Made an exception in my mod_rewrite so that you could browse a sub-directory. Otherwise I have WordPress on greedy mode:

          RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !(/blog/simple-wp) [NC]
          RewriteRule   ^/blog(.*) /core/blog$1  [PT]

• Surfed around and found some random theme to use
• Spent a sec hacking the header, footer, page and sidebar templates to have the right DOM elements
• Whipped up 3 pages and set one to be the default home page of the site
• Spot checked the new site in IE, FF3 and Safari

Total time according to Toggl was 40 minutes. 40 minutes to have your own rounded corner, fully dynamic navigation (1 page = top navigation), no blog in site, site. Awesome!

Click the image to see the site created in this post. Also you can download the modified theme to see how implemented it.