ACFUG – Atlanta ColdFusion User Group Presentation
At the February 2010 Atlanta ColdFusion User Group (ACFUG) meeting I gave a presentation on working with Omniture & ColdFusion. I based the presentation on a blog post I wrote last September.
As promised here are the presentation materials:
- Presentation
- Blog Posts with examples from presentation:
- Code Samples
- Tools / Links Referenced:
Bonus Resources:
In addition to numerous articles I have posted here on my blog, below are some great resources related to Omniture and web analytics in general. If you have questions or comments, please leave them below.
Omniture Resources:
Web Analytics Resources:
- Occam's Razor
- Web Analytics Association
- Beyond Web Analytics - Podcast
- Web Analytics Land
- The Empty Mind
Books:
-Rudi
Tracking Page Load Times
One of my favorite things about ColdFusion is the level of detail you can get from the debugging information. The ColdFusion server will provide upon request and the right permissions: variable scopes, sql query information, server information, and execution / load times. This is very useful information to have while coding and is invaluable when you are trying to optimize the speed and performance of the site. However, is it hard to get good benchmark for this data over time from the perspective of your end users.
Earlier this week, I set out to see if there was a way I could get access to the page load data and send it along to Omniture so that I could first get a benchmark of what the performance of the web site was over time, and second be able to tell if changes we made to the site had any impact on performance.
My first attempt in accomplishing my goal was to try and access the same Java object that the debugging code used to get the execution times. I thought, well I see it in the output on the screen, it should be easy enough to grab that data element and pass it along.
Are you ready for a kickstand?
It was a momentous week in the Shumpert house. My son informed me that he was "ready for a kickstand", and I was thrilled! What he meant by this was that he was finally ready to have the training wheels removed from his bike. In truth, he has been ready for a few months now, but had made up his mind that it was time. So we went to the store and picked out a kickstand, brought it home and installed it. He got on his bike and with a little push, he was cruising around the cul-de-sac like a pro. I was very proud.
As I sat there watching him ride his bike, I started to think about what he said. That he was "ready for a kickstand", and how that expression is different than the one I have heard more often of "ready for the training wheels to come off".
Being ready for a kickstand is to embrace the next challenge, to face what is ahead of you, and is a powerful, confident stance. Being ready to have the training wheels removed is still a good thing, but it does not give the impression of charging ahead into the next challenge. It is more of an acknowledgment that you are ready to face current task or challenge on your own.
How often in our jobs or projects have we been ready to charge ahead to the next, more challenging stage? To ask the more difficult questions? To begin to tackle things that in the past you would not have done. This is especially meaningful to me as over the next few months I am setting out to do things that a year ago I could not have imagined. I will be presenting at two different ColdFusion users groups on the benefits of adding web analytics to ColdFusion based web sites, applications. And if all goes well, I'll be giving a short customer talk at the Omniture summit on how my company is using the Omniture API's. This is something I am truly looking forward to.
And yes, I'm ready for my kickstand! Are you?
-Rudi
Review: Yahoo Web Analytics Book
For Christmas this year, I was lucky enough to receive a few analytic related books. Thanks in part that I put little else on my Amazon wish list! One of the books was Yahoo! Web Analytics - Tracking, Reporting, and Analyzing for Data-Driven Insights by Dennis Mortensen.
I put this book on my list to learn more about the technical requirements of implementing and working with Yahoo! Web Analytics. I had the basic vanilla code on my blog, but had not attempted to do anything more with it. This book proved to be just the guidance I was looking for.
I was pleased with how the book jumped right into the details of implementation without having to wade through chapters of background information and useless history. The instructions to get the basic tracking in place were clear and concise and provided all the the technical details necessary.
From there the book goes into the basic and advanced tags that can be employed to track just about anything of interest on your web site. What I especially liked about the book with regards to the explanation of the tags were the real world examples of how to use the tags within your site's code base, and then how these tags related to the settings and reports within the Yahoo! Web Analytics gui itself.
The pace of the book does not slow down as it goes into demonstrating how to get the most out of your data with leveraging all the tools and settings available to you with the Yahoo! Web Analytics interface. I went through the book while sitting at my pc so I could try each example as I read through them and feel that this method is the best way to get the most out of this book.
I have read many, many technical books before and I would definitely place this book in the top tier of technical books, and would highly recommend it to anyone working with the Yahoo! Analytics tool . It will go along side the other books I've read and continue to refer to frequently. This is the first technical book that prompted me to go out and try some more of the advanced techniques right away, as I relied heavily on this book as I have been working on a Yahoo! Web Analytics plugin for Wordpress.
-Rudi
5 Rules for Waging War
The February 2010 issue of the American History magazine had a great article on "George Washington's Five Rules for Waging War With Honor". As is often the case these days I could not help but think about how these rules apply to analytics. Not to say that working in analytics is like fighting a war, but there are many "battles" that each of us face in our daily tasks.
Washington's Rules were:
- Don't Assume You Are Welcome
- Cultivate Your Local Support
- Respect Local Religious Practices
- Don't Abuse Prisoners
- Withdraw if Your Objectives Are Unobtainable
Washington provided these rules along with some instructions to his officers on how they should conduct themselves in war and in conflict. If you examine the instructions, you can see how these rules can be applied to most projects or new ventures. Here is my take on how these rules can be applied to working with analytics in a corporation.
Archives
Beyond Web Analytics
- Episode 8: Social Media Metrics With Jim Sterne
- Episode 7: Mobile Analytics
- Episode 6 – Implementation Best Practices
Recent Posts
- ACFUG – Atlanta ColdFusion User Group Presentation
- Tracking Page Load Times
- Are you ready for a kickstand?
- Review: Yahoo Web Analytics Book
- 5 Rules for Waging War
Categories
Blogs I Follow
- Ben Nadel
- Beyond Web Analytics
- ColdFusion Jedi
- Crepuscular Light
- Empty Mind
- Insightr
- Omniture Industry Insights
- The Omni Man
- Tweak & Geek
- Web Analytics Guy’s Blog
- Web Analytics Land
Recently Read Articles
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- A Story Culture (Rands In Repose)
- The horror, the horror: @VodafoneUK's social media balls up (Posts from the Econsultancy blog)
- Understanding Statistical Significance with Omniture Test & Target (EmptyMind)
- Episode 2.3 - You need to talk to your lawyer (RIA Podcast)
- 5 Excuses You’re NOT Blogging To Build Your Personal Brand (And How To Get Over Them) (Personal Branding Blog - Dan Schawbel)
