jpreardon.com

Sometime in the winter of 2006, my good friend Jonas and I had a couple burgers and some wine at Café Loup. Burgers so good in fact–and wine in an adequate quantity–that we decided to write about the experience. A short time later, Burger & Bordeaux (burgerandbordeaux.com) came online. The idea of a burger blog was, and continues to be, far from original. For us, however, it was less about informing the public and more about giving us an excuse to eat burgers and drink wine on a semi-regular basis. Yes, we are selfish people.

We had a reasonable run, ate some quality burgers and quaffed our share of wine. And, in the process of writing about it, we used my favorite food blog word, devoid, on four separate occasions. But, as of this writing, it has been nearly a year since out last post. After a brief conversation, we decided that it was time to retire Burger & Bordeaux.

I know this loss may be tough to swallow for all one of our reader. But, there are many, many others out there eating and writing with much more frequency and doing a more thorough job. So, It’s not as if the burger eaters of NYC will be uninformed in our absence.

Thank you for reading our little burger blog and happy eating–don’t forget to put bacon on it.

Communication is expensive indeed. I’m not talking about long distance minutes here (those are quite inexpensive these days). I’m referring to communication between people on a team and within an organization. Everyone agrees that good communication is essential, but unnecessary communication saps productivity.

Joel Spolsky hits the nail on the head with his aptly titled column in Inc. magazine: A Little Less Conversation. He writes mostly about the challenge of reducing unneeded communication in a growing company, but his insights apply to larger, more established organizations as well.

Update 2010-05-12: At some point in the last couple weeks, the option for creating a mobile GATC seems to have disappeared. Mobile tracking, as described below, seems to be working. But, I have heard of others having problems. There doesn’t seem to be any official word from Google on this, yet.

Visits to your site from browsers that do not run javascript will not be tracked by the standard Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC). This isn’t a huge problem on most sites. On mobile sites, however, this can mean that you are not collecting data on a significant percentage of your visitors.

Google Analytics has the ability to track mobile sites without using javascript. This works by making a server side call to Google Analytics rather than relying on the browser to make this call with javascript. Google has provided example code in PHP, PERL, Java and ASPX. Unfortunately, they do not provide an example rails implementation–not yet anyway. To fill that void, Moneyspyder has created a sample Ruby on Rails application that implements the Google Analytics mobile tracking code (also available on github).

When I implemented mobile tracking on a site, I (very wrongly) used the sites regular “UA” account number. Mobile page views were indeed tracked, but only as one visitor. To say this another way, all mobile visitors activity looked as if they were coming from one single, long visit with a ton of page views. When I used the proper, mobile account number things started looking much better. This is strange behavior, but someone reported the same problem in the GA support forum. So, learn from my mistake.

To get started with Google Analytics mobile tracking, get your mobile Google Analytics account number by creating a new GA profile or hitting the “check status” link on an existing profile’s settings page. Once you are on the page that contains the standard tracking code, click over to the advanced tab and select the “A site built for a mobile phone” radio button. You’ll see some example code (the default is PHP). Your mobile GA account number is listed near the top (“$GA_ACCOUNT = “MO-XXXXXXX-X”;”). It will look pretty much the same as your regular account number with one exception. The first two letters will be “MO” rather than “UA”.

One other caveat here is that you should not attempt to use both the standard GATC and the server side tracking code on the same page.

Google Analytics has released an asynchronous version of their tracking code. Listed among the benefits of using the asynchronous tracking code are shorter page load times and more accurate visitor tracking–both good reasons to consider using the asynchronous code.

Implementing the asynchronous code is as easy as implementing the current, synchronous version. If, however, you have made any customizations to your existing tracking code, you will need to migrate those customizations to the asynchronous version. Those interested in migrating GA tracking code customizations should take a look at Google Analytics for Developers and these migration examples.

via Google Analytics Blog

we don’t need half of what we got.

– Barbara Koricanek in the New York Times

I couldn’t agree more. The Times reports that a trend among Americans seems to value experiences over things. Let’s hope this trend continues.

Everyone is tired of hearing about New Year’s Resolutions by now–it’s the second day of the year after all. But, this is one we would all do well by:

Cut down still further on American fast food.
–Dave Cook (Eating in Translation)

Photo: Partially whitewashed McDonald’s ad, First Avenue, New York © Dave Cook

I’m not posting any resolutions this year, although, I do have a couple. We’ll see if I can stick to them for more than a few days.

If you’re feeling a bit rough this New Year’s Day, take some pleasure in knowing that you must feel better than the twenty-something guy that was urinating on the F platform at York Street at about 1:30 this morning. This cat was so far gone that his date had to prop the poor bastard up while he messily went about doing his business. Discretion? Not necessary for this guy. He just let it all dribble out about 6 feet from the stairs, directly on the yellow line. The unfortunate people that walked through this puddle later would have been delighted to know that his fashionable, paper “happy new year” hat landed squarely in the middle of said puddle about halfway through this pathetic display. He’s going to have an epic hangover when he wakes up today. And his shoes, well, let’s just say that they won’t be wet from walking in the snow. I’m also thinking that his girlfriend may be resolving to find someone that can hold their liquor. So, hat’s off to you, dude, for making all of our commutes just a little more entertaining.

Happy 2010!