All entries from April 2008

Matt, Jason and I will be speaking at Smart/Models, a one-day AIGA/NY conference, on Saturday May 17th. In our presentation, Creativity and the Collective, we will be discussing the Athletics business model.

We will be joined by principals from four other unconventional organizations: Jason Fried from 37signals, Joe Duffy and Eric Block from Duffy & Partners, Sylvia Harris from Sylvia Harris, LLC, and Douglas Riccardi from Memo Productions.

For more details:
http://smartmodels.aigany.org

Most every web project we push out the door uses both Mint and Google Analytics (GA) for site stats/tracking/analytics.

Analytics software has come a long way since the days of server log file analysis programs such as Webalizer. Modern jobs like Mint and GA take a different approach, using client-side Javascript to grab more in-depth user data. The client-side approach better differentiates between humans and robots, and captures the return visits of users browsing pages from their browser’s cache. And though it was once a concern, nowadays only weirdos are browsing without Javascript support. They don’t count.

Mint
http://www.haveamint.com

Unless you’re juggling metrics at an ad agency, Mint will generally get the job done, delivering a well organized and easy to digest overview of site activity. A single page/interface reveals your latest visits, referrers, pages, searches and more.

The user experience is very different from GA. Mint doesn’t dig particularly deep, but it’s fast and fun. The interface is chock full of Javascript/AJAX flippity-do’s.

Mint is a self-hosted app and requires a server running both PHP and MySQL — basic gear. Mint collects data via Javascript, then drops it into a MySQL database using a bit of PHP. Mint runs quick, provides real-time stats, and is easy to install.

Cost: $30 per site license (per domain). Cheap.

The Visits module:

The User Agents module displaying Screen Resolutions. Notice how many users are still at 1024×768, even on a site generally trafficked by design/tech folks.

The User Agents module displaying Browsers. Sadly, 10% are still using IE6.

The User Agents module displaying Flash Player installs. 94% on 9, amazing. Thanks Youtube…

Favorite feature: Mint provides an RSS feed of your site’s newest unique referrers. Plug this into Google Reader (or whatever you like) and you can keep up every new website, blog, link-list, etc. that directs traffic to your site. Beyond the obvious utility, this tool can also reveal web theft in progress.

Mint Demo:
http://www.haveamint.com/about/demo

Mint Feature Highlights:
http://www.haveamint.com/about/feature_highlights

Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics

Upon acquiring Urchin’s tracking software in 2005, Google re-released the software as Google Analytics, free of charge. Given Urchin’s popularity and the new non-price, GA was everywhere seemingly overnight.

GA does fifty-eleven things; it certainly out-features Mint. You’ll find charts, graphs, tables and maps everywhere, for every possible metric. It’s great for analyzing very specific trends. You could spend hours digging through it all.

You can manage any number (or at least a whole bunch) of domains within a single GA/Google account. Not everyone manages a pile of domains, but for those that do, this is a big deal.

If you’re prepping a stats report for a client, check out the export-to-PDF or XML feature. GA produces very attractive PDFs which you can then take into Illustrator and chop up as needed. This includes charts, and it’s all vector.

Unlike Mint, GA allows for the tracking of Flash events, and of file downloads (PDFs, mp3s, etc.) See here and here.

GA even offers a Content Overlay view, allowing you to browse your site with GA sprinkling stats all over the page. You can see which links are getting the most clicks. Check it:

(If you’re into this sort of data visualization, check out Crazy Egg. That’s their whole deal.)

Another interesting feature is the Map Overlay. By analyzing user IP addresses, GA is able to map which countries visitors are coming from.

Why run both?

The biggest difference between Mint and GA is that GA is always a day behind. GA only updates account data once every 24 hours. (Real-time analytics would introduce massive data-processing overhead for Google.) Mint, however, always displays up to the minute data.

Analyzing trends is great, but there are many instances where you want real-time stats. If you can’t ride the refresh button the day you get linked up on Digg, NYTimes, etc., you’ll have missed the fun.

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Questions? Comments? Contact James via email - .

The web is pretty well open. You can view-source your way through most HTML, CSS and Javascript. That’s how most web workers learned their way around — by studying other websites. It’s one of the things we like about the web.

We certainly have no issue with anyone viewing our HTML, CSS, etc. But please don’t steal our design. And certainly don’t copy/paste our entire site HTML+CSS, change out the logo, post it behind your own domain and call it your own. Unfortunately, this happens on a somewhat regular basis.

Thanks to Mint’s newest unique referrers RSS feed, we can keep up with the latest URLs linking to the Athletics site. This feed lists the latest sites, blogs, link-lists, etc. directing traffic to our site.

And yesterday, upon clicking through to some of the latest referrers, we found this:

(Click for enlarged)

Web theft, in progress. Here we have someone in the process of customizing our site to make it their own. They have changed out the logo, changed some copy, but otherwise you can see they are still using our graphics and copy.

We couldn’t find an email address on the site, but after doing a whois on the domain we found that it’s registered to someone in Ankara, Turkey. We did find an email address registered with the domain, but it bounced back our kindly worded please-remove-our-property-from-your-site email.

Then, after taking a closer look, we noticed that they were still linking directly to our images. We realized we had the ability to send the folks at Yenioyun (and other web-offenders that we may not be aware of) a message.

Using a bit of mod_rewrite code, we were able to reroute all external requests for images on our server to an altogether different image.

Click through to http://yenioyun.org/ to see the result. And as I’m sure they will be changing their site shortly, here’s a screenshot for posterity. For the full effect, see the ani-gif we are using.

Of course this is nothing new. Web admins have long employed this sort of tactic for dealing with users leeching bandwidth (hotlinking images within their MySpace pages, message boards, porn sites, etc.) Most recently, I particularly enjoyed the John McCain MySpace incident.

Please, have the code:

With the help of this article and the mod_rewrite manual, we put the following mod_rewrite rule into an .htaccess file and placed it in our images directory.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_FILENAME}  .(gif|jpe?g|png)$  [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !^$
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !athleticsnyc.com   [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !bloglines.com   [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !google.   [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{HTTP_REFERER}  !search?q=cache   [NC]
  RewriteCond  %{REQUEST_URI} !^/images/stop_stealing.gif
  RewriteRule  (.*)   http://athleticsnyc.com/images/stop_stealing.gif?id=$1   [R,NC,L]
</IfModule>

The first line looks looks for all gif, jpeg and png files. The next few lines define the domains allowed to serve up our images (we want Google Reader and Bloglines users to be able to view our images). The next to last line disregards the rules if you’re requesting the replacement image (to keep from causing an infinite loop of redirects).

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Questions? Comments? Contact James via email - .

Brief commentary on the music portion of this year’s SxSW, my first contact.

SxSW is a bit like visiting Six Flags for five days straight, but instead of waiting in line for rollercoasters, rock bands. Fifty-eleven bands are playing at any given moment. At all times everyone is consumed by a sense of anxiety about which bands they want to catch, if they can get into the shows, and where the after-hours hipster pool party is. We played a few shows as well.

Perhaps I would better enjoy the event if I had a personal concierge to make all decisions for me, secure my place on various guest lists and physically escort me from location to location. Without such services I found the experience a bit exhausting.

I did enjoy catching one of The Marked Men sets: four guys from Denton, TX blazing through power-pop tunes.

I’m a bit late to the punch on this one, but I’ve been repeat-listening their latest full-length, Fix My Brain, released on Swami. If you have the exact same musical taste as me, you’ll enjoy it.

Top track: Sully My Name (2MB, mp3). I’m a sucker for anything with double-tracked drums.

• Buy on iTunes
• Buy on Amazon
• http://www.myspace.com/themarkedmen

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Comments? Use email: .

I’m sure road-warrior PC folks are quite familiar with the latest mobile internet gadgets, but until recently, I was not.

I had the opportunity to spend a chunk of March on the road, eventually making my way down to Austin, TX for SxSW. Being a busy guy, it was necessary that I get work done while bumbling around.

I had heard tale of the little data cards that provide internet access over 3G cell networks, but I’d never seen one in action. After a bit of research I discovered that they now offer little PC/Mac-compatible USB sticks that get the job done, no card required. All of the big providers – AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc. – offer these things. I had read a nice thing or two about Sprint so I gave them a shot.

Here’s what the gadget looks like:
(I found some better photos here)

Setup was easy. The gadget actually comes with the OS X drivers built in (it has an internal flash drive), so the initial install went quickly. Once set up, getting online is easy: you plug in the stick, wait for it to power up, then click Connect using the standard OS X Internet Connect app.

They market these things as running at broadband speeds, but I figured this was likely a generous description. Thus, I was surprised to find that this thing was fast, especially in metropolitan areas. I was uploading/downloading big files, watching YouTube videos, downloading iTunes episodes of Lost, etc. It wasn’t cable/fiber fast, but fast nonetheless.

One thing I noticed: each time you made a web request after a period of inactivity, there would be a 1-2 second lag before data started moving. But once it got going, it was fast again.

Reception was great. Speed was good even in many remote areas. The only black-out spot that I experienced was in a remote stretch between Little Rock and Baton Rouge.

My only complaint: I didn’t like having a little USB stick dangling off the side of my computer. I was always worried about accidentally putting pressure on it and having it break. Sprint did a great job jamming a 3G cell phone into a little USB stick, but I couldn’t help but wish that it was already built into the machine, as WiFi is.

The Sprint deal

You pay $200 for the gadget and $60/month for unlimited access. Not a bad deal, but then they ruin it by requiring a 2-year contract, just as they do with cell phones. It’s not just Sprint – all of the major providers do this.

Fortunately, Sprint offers a 30-day trial period: sign up for the 2-year contract, use the service all you want for up to 30 days, and if for any reason you wish to discontinue the service, you can return the gadget for a full refund and cancel your contract, no questions asked, no penalty fee. You are only charged a prorated portion of the $60/month service fee.

Thus, I had Sprint mobile internet for the duration of my trip, and upon return, promptly cancelled the service. Total cost: $55.

Thoughts (or, what the MacBook Air is missing)

Having ubiquitous, wireless, broadband internet feels like the future. It just works. It makes bothering with (and often paying for) WiFi hotspots seem very lame.

Now that I know ubiquitous internet is possible, it’s turning into an expectation. John Gruber’s comment comes to mind:

After using my iPhone for a few months, it started feeling weird that my PowerBook doesn’t have ubiquitous wireless networking: Wi-Fi when available, and seamless, instant switchover to something else when it isn’t.

I’ve seen the MacBook Air up close. It’s rad. But not quite to-the-max, I’m afraid. I’m just not sweating it. My MacBook Pro gets the job done. I can deal with the two extra pounds.

I think a lot of the tech world feels the same way: the Air’s form is very impressive, but that’s where the innovation sorta putters out.

My feeling is that if you’re going to introduce a breakthrough ultra-portable, and call it Air, it should deliver on the wireless promise.

I would have liked to have seen Apple extend their partnership with AT&T to include built-in support for AT&T’s 3G data service. (Sony does this with their VAIO laptops. Most of them come with built-in support for Sprint’s high-speed service.) Given the Apple/AT&T iPhone relationship, Apple likely could have persuaded AT&T to offer an Air data plan without requiring a 2-year contract — perhaps a pay-as-you-go plan, or an optional add-on to your iPhone bill. Whatever. Just give me a fair plan. I’d pay for it.

Until Air incorporates some sort of mobile broadband, I’m not seduced. If I’m a mobile computer person, and I need an ultra-portable device, I want wireless. I don’t care about DVD/CD drives, a bunch of ports, or face-melting performance. I just want to be on the internet everywhere. And I definitely don’t want some USB modem-stick dangling off the side of my otherwise flawless machine.