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Frank Miller’s Speech to the 1994 Diamond Retailers’ Summit

August 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment

[Full Audio Below]

In college, I was hopelessly addicted to comics. As is the case with most addictions, it doesn’t take long before you realize that the easiest and best way to fuel your addiction is by becoming a dealer. So around my junior/senior year of college, I decided to form a “Comic Book Co-Op”. I had some friends in college who shared my passion for comics and had the requisite monthly appetite. I got myself a Tax ID, a Diamond account, and began ordering books for myself and friends, and passing along the 40-50% discount. It was pretty cool while it lasted, and I made a little money on the side selling exclusives, variants, and whatnot at a time when those things commanded a decent price in a hot collector’s market.

It also got me into retailer-only events, one of which was the annual Diamond Retailers Summit. In 1994, this was a huge affair. This was the year that Dark Horse Comics debuted its “Legends” imprint, which at the time, was a SuperGroup of comic imprints. Jim Shooter was also in attendance to promote his new “Defiant Comics” brand, after having just been ousted at one of the hottest publishers of the day, Valiant Comics. It was a crazy time to be in comics, underscored by the fact that the first great talent of my youth, Jack “King” Kirby had passed away and it truly felt like an era had passed, and here, in this convention center, was the future of comics unfolding before us. So there was excitement tinged with melancholy.

So it was with tremendous anticipation that I looked forward to that year’s annual banquet, hosted by Steve Geppi, with none other than Frank Miller… yes, the Frank Miller giving the keynote speech.

It was classic Frank. To set the stage, at the table in front of him sat most of Marvel Comics’ senior editorial staff, and to the right of them sat DC comics. Keep that in mind while you listen to one of the best, “angry men” in comics at the time. It was the first time I ever saw a crowd of people give a comic book creator a standing ovation.

Frank Miller’s Keynote Speech to the 1994 Diamond Retailers’ Summit
[Click Below to Listen]:

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Filed Under: Personal

August 30, 2010

August 31, 2010 By 1 Comment


I'm not a weight weenie. I'm a "does it look bad-ass?" weenie.

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Once again, the week gets away from me…

August 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

“It’s Wednesday already?”

The last time I blogged was last Saturday when I was at Wordcamp. The impression might be that I don’t have a lot to say. That’s not entirely true. I actually just don’t have time to get it all down on paper! My head’s still spinning, I’ve got a “to do” list a mile and a half long, I’ve been working furiously on the back end of this site, and I’ve added so many cool features over the last three days I wouldn’t even know where to begin listing them all!

I do know that I’ve got a great blog post swirling around in my head, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to focus on becoming a Genesis Theme Framework expert in the not-too-distant future. I’ve been doing my best Amerigo Vespucci impression and have been dutifully exploring the theme framework for the last week or so, and I’m sold.

So don’t fret. Don’t fear. I still have much to do, and will be trying my best to get as much of it blogged for posterity’s sake as I can. Just know that Ground Control here at Planet Jeff is working furiously behind the scenes to bring you even more space-monkey madness!

Filed Under: Meta, Personal Tagged With: , ,

Live-blogging WordCamp, or “A day at summercamp… for nerds”.

August 21, 2010 By 2 Comments
Wordcamp Savannah, Saturday August 21, 2010


Welcome to Wordcamp!

7:49 AM
Good morning! Up and atom! Hotel room coffee brewed, phone charged, camera ready, iPad packed up, ticket printed, and (in about 5 minutes) laptop packed and ready to go. Today is the full day of WordCamp in Savannah, and I’m getting ready to head downstairs for breakfast (yay breakfast!) and walk down the street to register. Today I’m planning on live-blogging all day from the conference. I’m going to blog about my thoughts, things I pick up, tips, tricks, and cool things as I come across them. So stay tuned, follow along, and come back often. It’s going to be a LONG day, and I hope to get a lot of it down on “paper”.

9:00 AM
All registered and ready to go. Crowd looks awesome and I’m really surprised at the number of designers in attendance. You know, it’s fairly easy to pick out the designers and the developers. I’m pretty sure the designers buy their glasses from the same place they get their ironic t-shirts. I do believe that the place next-door is where all the hip chicks get their sleeves. There’s also an interesting breakdown of audience by use. By a show of hands, half the people here are wordpress.com and half are wordpress.org. The other breakdown that got my attention was that approximately 75% of the attendees are using WordPress as a CMS. Yep. We’re not just blogging anymore, people.

Matt Mullenweg is our surprise speaker this morning for the opening, “WordPress Showcase” otherwise known as “Cool shit you can do with WordPress”. Fun talk to start things off. The presentation isn’t playing well, so Matt’s giving us a kind of “mini-history” of WordPress and pointing out highlights of different features that have been developed over the years. Here’s a fun fact: Both Kanye West and Jay-Z’s websites are WordPress sites? Yeah, I didn’t know that either.

9:46 AM
Cool presentation. Unfortunately the projector issues were never resolved and we didn’t get to actually see the sites that Matt was talking about, but there were enough laptops open nearby that, as he mentioned sites, you could scope them over shoulders. When I get some time, I’ll make sure and list the ones he called out, but they all came from the WordPress Showcase site. So head over there and take a look.

We’re downstairs now in Shayne Sanderson’s PHP and CSS for WordPress presentation. Should be fun.

10:10 AM
Well, that was a bit basic, but to be fair, it was called “Beginner PHP and CSS”. The good news, however, is that it  seems like my grasp of PHP is firmer than I would’ve thought, and when I compare my skill level with the questions that people around me are asking, my self confidence is defnitely a bit boosted. Still, it was a great presentation, and I’m glad I had Steve sitting next to me while he went through some live demos of CSS.

Mark Jaquith is stepping up to the podium now to school us on WordPress plugins. Now this is what I’m talkin’ about! We’re looking at a few of the WordPress APIs and digging into some of the low level WordPress functionality. Mark’s on the core development team, so it should be insightful.

10:45 AM
Sweet, Matt Thomas, the designer of “Twenty Ten” is up now. He’s going to give us some insight into how the new 3.0 default theme came about. He’s a great designer, so I’m looking forward to his presentation. (Here’s an immediate take-away: 16 pixel text on a web page is identical to 11 point printed type, so stop making your text tiny, use font-size: 100%!)

10:55 AM
Okay, I’m like, ten minutes into Matt’s presentation, and my head is already spinning. Hearing him discuss how Twenty Ten came about, and revealing insight into some of the great new CSS/Theme features of WordPress 3.0 is awesome. I might actually consider jumping on the Theme bandwagon after this.

Oh, and feature image as a custom header for each post? Kick ass. This is the one presentation that I’m going to take a LOT away from.

Here’s a link to Matt’s Presentation.

11:07 AM
Awesome, awesome presentation, that segued right into the next presentation, “Customizing Themes/Child Themes” by Sara Cannon. We’re actually ahead of schedule, so we’re going to take a few minute break, I’m going to go get some more coffee, and check out Matt’s slides.

1:00 PM
Lunch from Angel’s BBQ was fantastic. The BBQ pork, chicken and southern sides was delicious. Definitely the gastronomic highlight so far, exceeding my experience at Paula Deen’s last night by a mile. I’ve never had Collard Greens made with peanuts before, but I can guarantee you this isn’t the last time. That’s a recipe I’m taking back home and trying asap!

Sara Cannon’s Customizing Themes/Child Themes presentation was excellent. A link to her slides is available on her Twitter page. I highly recommend going to Slideshare and checking them out.

Following her presentation, before lunch, we were all ushered upstairs for Matt Mullenweg’s “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Your Themes” presentation, and it was also a great presentation. A lot of these presentations are really great for people who are still mucking their way through some of the changes that WordPress 3.0 brought to the table, and I’m no exception. The last three presentations have all given me a couple of great new take-aways that I either wasn’t fully aware of, or hadn’t fully explored, but will definitely make more of an effort to expose myself to as soon as I get home. Feature image use is a big one, and a lot of features of the built in Gallery functionality are at the top of my “must explore” list. I definitely have a lot of great blog topics coming up as I elucidate these new features.

Next up is Chris Cree’s “Functional Themes” presentation, followed by John James Jacoby’s “Adding BuddyPress to Your Site”. Two topics I’m really looking forward to hearing more about!

2:12 PM
Great presentation from Chris Cree that wound up being pretty serendipitous.  He was discussing “Functional Themes” and by the end of the discussion we were hip deep in the Genesis Theme Framework. For those of you following along at home, this site’s based on the Genesis Theme Framework, and I’ve been playing around with this Theme Framework now for a couple of weeks. The functionality of these themes is beyond cool. I was particularly blown away by the real estate functionality of one of the Genesis frameworks based on a Real Estate website. Property searches based on property features (bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, etc) with a built in real estate listing functionality. I hadn’t really played around with that theme, and was pleasantly surprised at the depth of functionality available, built right in.

In the middle of the BuddyPress presentation and if you’re looking to build your own social network (and really, who isn’t these days?) then this is most definitely the path I’d take. The depth of this plugin for WordPress is astonishing. If you wanna see it in action, they’ve set up a demo site that’s running just a vanilla, basic, install of BuddyPress over at http://bptest.org/. Discussion forums, user streams, groups… it’s all built right in. Very clean, very cool, and a terrific way to build your own little active community for your own specific needs. Color me impressed!

2:45 PM (Last Post of the Day…)
Daryl Koopersmith’s jQuery and WordPress presentation. We’re beginning with sort of an introduction to jQuery, with a bit of emphasis on how to implement jQuery in WordPress. Couple of cool little pointers. Great technical presentation.

This is my last liveblog entry. There really isn’t much more I’m interested in, and I’m gonna head back to the hotel and work on digesting this a bit. I’ve taken in quite a bit of information today and I’m looking forward to sorting all this out into some kind of actionable plan of attack. Obviously I’m going to put some work into this site to test out a lot of my ideas and code, so make sure you check back often to see how it plays out!

Hope you’ve enjoyed my liveblogging. I’ve had a great time here in Savannah, and I hope I’ve shared enough with you to get you interested in looking for more information on some of the topics that were covered over the weekend. Feel free to contact me, ask questions, comment, etc.

Thanks!

Filed Under: Development & Design Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

[Wordcamp] Live blogging the weekend away.

August 19, 2010 By 1 Comment

iPad? Check. Android? Check. Laptop? Check. WordPress apps all loaded up? Check.

Just a heads up. I’m leaving in a couple hours to head down to Savannah for this year’s WordPress conference, “Wordcamp 2010″. I’m going to try something I’ve never really done before and that’s live blogging. On Saturday and Sunday, there will be a lot of sessions going on, and during breaks between sessions (or perhaps during some sessions, if wifi and inspiration cooperate) I’m going to try to get my immediate thoughts down on “paper”. I’ve always been a fan of live blogging events, like Gizmodo or some of the larger tech blogs do, and I think this will be a great opportunity for me to do it.

It’s going to be a blend of tech, design, functionality, and inspiration, so I think there will be a lot that people who are interested in this platform, but are unable to attend, will get out of it.

So stay tuned, check in over the next couple of days. I’m planning on taking advantage of all the resources at my disposal over the weekend, so this place might change a little too. Because everyone knows the best part about attending a conference is going back to the hotel room with room service and a laptop and banging out examples of the shit you just learned, right?

See you back here this weekend, and in the meantime, I’ll be sure and update the Twitter Feed with as much goodness as I can. First stop, Sewee Restaurant outside of Mount Pleasant, for some delicious, authentic, southern cuisine.

Filed Under: Development & Design Tagged With: , , ,

Will there be marshmallow roasting and s’mores?

August 17, 2010 By 3 Comments

This Thursday I’m leaving for WordCamp in Savannah, GA and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve been to a lot of conferences. Design conferences, programming conferences, product conferences, but this is one I’m genuinely curious about. I’ve been using WordPress for a little while (I started with Blogger and LiveJournal, picking up on WordPress in the last year or so), and with the release of version 3.0 and my recent foray into the Genesis Theme Framework (not to mention the well-timed jump from ColdFusion to PHP… serendipity and all that), I’ve really started to get into the potential this whole platform has. Plus, I’m  looking forward to mingling with some like-minded fellow geeks and picking some of the brains in attendance.

Why all the WordPress love? Let me use an analogy.

I’m a programmer (well, that’s how I’d have to describe myself if you held a gun to my head). Now, there’s a lot you can do with programming. If apps were cars (just go with me here) you pretty much have a lot of the same opportunities. You could design cars. You have a lot of terrific technical expertise to bring to bear and could design new cars that solve new problems. With a little tweak to your skillset, you could build cars. You know, buy raw materials, learn a bit of welding & fabricating, and out of thin air create something that maybe someone else has put some time and energy into designing. Some guys, however, enjoy chopping cars. Taking cars someone else has built, and chopping them up, reworking them, slapping on some hella paint job and delivering a whole new experience, albeit one that’s based on a solid, proven foundation. Heck, you could be a wunderkind and do it all. Design cars, build cars, and customize cars like a maestro. Those guys are out there, for sure, but it’s been my experience that the guys who focus on one part of that process do exceptionally well in the end.

Right now, I’m thoroughly enjoying building customs.

I like all the work they (WordPress) have done building a stable, expandable, open platform. I like that I don’t have to invent any wheels (but if I wanted to, I could, very easily). I like that the hooks and inner workings that are exposed to me are crystal clear, and all I have to do now is bring my skillset to the party and knock out the fun part. The creative part. The rewarding part (at least for me, at this stage in my life/career). I’m absolutely convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the framework these guys have built will suit the needs of about 99.9% of the businesses out there, and for about 75% of you, it’s WAY more than enough. Need a calendar? There’s a plugin for that. Need some crazy Flash doo-hicky or a whiz bang photo gallery? There’s a plugin for that (probably several). Wanna add a contact form? Oh yeah, plugin. Wanna hook your site up to the bazillion social services out there? Plugin, plugin, plugin. Need something but there’s no plugin? Write a plugin for it. Heck, find something someone else hasn’t done and write one just to get your name out there.

And that’s just the technical widgetry. I haven’t even gotten into the CSS do-goodery! Go get a theme. Shit, go get a theme framework. They have frameworks for themes that plug into a framework that’s a blogging platform. Go ahead, wrap your head around that one if you can. You get best practices coding, SEO, ease of use, an easily administrable back end… and more.

All I have to do it toss you the keys when I’m done and you’re all set. But don’t take my word for it. Look at some of the companies that have discovered this shit. Starbucks, CNN, Wired, The New York Times. They’ve all figured out that when you remove all the discussion about implementation and execution, you can focus on all the important stuff, like getting your site to do what it’s supposed to be doing.

So I’m really looking forward to going down to Savannah this weekend, taking along a great designer from my agency, and spending a few days immersed in all things WordPress. If anybody who’s reading this is planning on going down to Savannah, drop me a line, I’m staying at the Sheraton Four Points, and I would love to talk geekery!

Filed Under: Development & Design, Meta Tagged With: , , , ,

I hope Vincent Chase dies.

August 12, 2010 By 1 Comment

Just a heads up. I haven’t seen ANY scenes from next week’s “Entourage”. I don’t know any spoilers, I don’t really know anything. I woke up really early this morning, and while I was making breakfast and reading emails, I turned on this weekend’s episode of HBO’s “Entourage”. I’ve been sort of hot and cold on this series for the past couple of seasons. I don’t really care about the whole Ari Gold storyline. Turtle’s story isn’t really compelling, and Eric’s just a douche. I do, however, love Johnny Drama, and when Vincent decided to do that stunt a couple episodes back, and recently started taking Vicodin because of a back injury, my ears pricked up. I had a sense something deeper was going on here, and his subconscious path to self destruction (skydiving, dating porn stars, just generally edging his way to harder and harder living) started becoming… well… interesting.

Then the final scene of this week’s episode.

For a brief second I thought, “is he dead?” then almost immediately went, “nah, they’d never kill him off”.

Then I started to think about it a little more as I ate breakfast, and the more I thought about it, the more the idea of killing him off really got to me. Think about it, we’ve followed this career from almost nothing beginnings, to superstardom, then back down again, and now back up to this place where we’re currently watching the deal of his life being waved in front of him. $100 million dollars over the next 3 years (potentially). The biggest payday he’s ever seen. The chance of a lifetime. Wouldn’t it be tragic if this were how it all turned out?

See? Tragic. Compelling. This would be bold storytelling. Brave, unexpected television.

Exactly what’s NOT on TV anyplace right now that I’ve seen. It would be a sobering reminder of the period this lifestyle puts on the sentence these kids write. The Lindsay Lohans, the Kim Kardashians, the vapid, exploited way in which lives are used up then spit out of the machine that everyone craves to be a part of.

I think it’d be epic. Here’s hoping they can’t revive him.

Filed Under: Fun and Frivolous, Personal Tagged With: , ,

Getting burnt out on consumption.

August 9, 2010 By 3 Comments

I’m tired of buying things. Not just “luxury items” or superfluous gadgets and electronics, but everything. I get angry when I have to buy gas for my car. I get upset when my bar tape on my handlebars starts to tear with wear and I have to replace it. It bothers me to no end that the battery on my heart rate monitor goes dead and I have to fork over $4 for some special tiny little battery that I literally have to buy at a “battery specialty store”. About the only thing that doesn’t make me angry are food purchases. I don’t know what it is, but lately I’m loathe to spend money on things. I briefly thought last week that I “needed” to buy a $24 coffee grinder. Can you believe that? I actually looked at it and for a few minutes, could justify the purchase as something I “needed”. I didn’t buy it, and on the way home, in my car, I started to actually think, “why do I even drink coffee?”. I mean, it seems like everywhere I look, I’m surrounded by needless consumption. It never really bothered me before, but lately it’s started to get under my skin more and more.

I stopped buying new comics about three months ago. New comics suck for the most part, they’re WAY overpriced, and I just can’t seem to wrap my head around walking into a store every week and dropping $20, $25, or even $30 on comics that are just going to take up space in my house and eventually become a storage nightmare. Besides, the print runs are in the hundreds of thousands, there are any number of people buying them, never opening then, storing them in bags and filing them away. Ergo, they’ll never be “hard to come by” at any point in time, and for the most part, they’re essentially worthless as soon as you leave the store. If I were going to spend $20-$25, I’d much rather spend it on a single, valuable, “somewhat hard to come by” book that would actually take someone a bit of effort to get their hands on. Even better, a book that was significant, meant something, and had value as a key book.

But that’s just comics. I’ve got a Gamefly membership that allows me to rent games for as long as I want without purchasing them. Over the years I’ve rented hundreds of games, beaten them, sent them back, and moved on. It’s only the rare few games that I’ll buy, and this weekend, when I looked at the drawer I had of video games I had actually spent money on over the last couple of years, it legitimately upset me. Rather than look at them and think, “these were fun, I’m glad I bought them.” I saw, “shit, each of these things costs me $60 a piece, and I’ve got almost a dozen fucking games in here that I haven’t touched in months.” The only game I saw in the drawer that I felt like I got my money’s worth was Fallout for Xbox 360, and I bought that one used after renting it for about three months.

It just seems like every place I look, I see a testament to useless consumption. Consumption for no other reason than to consume. The only things I can think of off the top of my head that I’ve purchased in the last couple of years that have enriched my life are the City of Myrtle Beach gym membership ($290 for the whole year versus $45 a month for comparable gym memberships around town) and the odd assortment of bike tools and clothing I’ve slowly collected, enabling me to ride my bike with somewhat increasing regularity (which I happily remind myself doesn’t cost me a cent).

I started thinking about all of this when I went though my inbox and realized that more than half of the emails I get are from people selling me something. Weekly emails selling me cool t-shirts, emails notifying me of sales on shoes, and what books I might like this week. All carefully calculated based on my interests and previous purchasing history. In other words, much more efficient at being able to separate me from my money in ways never before witnessed.

So what am I going to do about it? Well I think I’m going to spend the next week or so removing myself from as many of those emails as I can. I just don’t want to get bombarded anymore with offer after offer after offer. Oh sure, I’ll see something I like. I’ll see something that I might justify with, “I need this…” because let’s face it, they don’t call it an “impulse” for nothing, and I’m not even sitting here claiming I’m immune from the impulse. Hardly. In fact, I’m just the opposite. I KNOW I’ll see some worthless shit I’ll “need” and find some way to justify buying a deluxe hardbound collector edition testament to my weakness. So no more weekly Amazon alerts. No more nudges from Zappos. No more notifications from eBay that someone has just listed that Green Lantern I was looking for. I hear complaints all the time about being bombarded with information. I get that. But I’m less inclined to think that it’s information we’re being bombarded with. Instead, I think maybe we’re being bombarded with cues. That we “need” this, or buy that, or we “have to have” something. Some cues are more subtle than others, but I just get a sense that if I shut down as much of the noise as I can with the little bit of control that I DO have over what gets “blasted” to me on a daily basis, that I might actually start to just think more about where I want to spend money, rather than the emotional pull of the 10% off that I can get, but only if I buy it in the next three days.

Let’s see how that works.

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: , , ,

How to exclude yourself from your own Google Analytics – Asynchronous Edition.

August 5, 2010 By 13 Comments

A Little Background

If you’ve got a website, you’re probably interested in who visits it, where they come from, how long they stay, what pages they look at, etc. You’re not alone. It’s one of the most important things you can do to guarantee that your website accomplishes its goal, whatever that goal may be. There’s nothing more powerful than being armed with information when it comes to all aspects of designing, executing, and managing a web presence, and your website’s analytics is the most powerful weapon in your arsenal.

Perhaps the best known, and most widely used tool in the analytics war is Google Analytics. This indispensable, free tool provides near-realtime feedback on your site and its audience. The implementation of Google Analytics is fairly straightforward. You get yourself a Google Account (and really, at this point, who doesn’t have a Google Account?), you register your site, insert a bit of code they provide you into each page you want tracked, and viola! You’re collecting important, valuable information on people who visit your site!

“But waitaminute,” you’re saying, “don’t I visit my own site?”

Why, yes. Yes you do, and therein lies the problem we’re about to solve for you.

The code you drop into your website doesn’t really know who you are. It doesn’t know that you’d like to track everyone who visits your site, except you. You have to tell it not to. You do that by excluding yourself from being tracked with your own code. Now, your first thought might be to say (inner monologue time), “don’t track anyone who comes from my IP address…” then your second thought might be, “what the hell is an IP address and why do I care?” So in the spirit of true helpfulness I’ll answer both. Tracking via IP addresses is, in my opinion, a messy idea. Your IP address is the number or “address” (hence the name, and allowing me to use the word “hence”) from where your computer is connecting to the internet. Not a bad idea, at least superficially, to think that “I should exclude visits to my website that originate from here”. But then you realize, “wait, I have a laptop, what if I connect to my website at home?” or, “what if my IP address changes for some reason?”.

So the solution, then, is to exclude your visits by using a cookie. This is the way we’re going to do it, and here’s an oversimplification of exactly what we’re going to do:

  1. We’re going to set a cookie, and set it to some value (entirely up to you!).
  2. Then, we’re going to tell Google Analytics, “hey, whenever you see this cookie, just don’t count this visit…mmkay?”

This is good for several reasons. First, it allows you to use multiple browsers. Don’t you check your site in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, and Opera? Of course you do. This solution means that all the browsers you use can have this cookie set, letting you use multiple browsers without the worry that every time you do, you’re tripping your traffic numbers. Secondly, it doesn’t matter from where you view your site. Look at it on the road, in the airport, on a train, in a box with a fox. As long as you’ve set this cookie, you’re not going to skew your own data. Finally, this allows you to exclude multiple people. Say you’ve got a team of people working on your site, or a business partner, or your significant other, it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to track each of their IP addresses, you just set the same cookie in all their browsers, and be done with it. One nice, clean solution.

Speaking of Solution…

So how do you do this? Well, it couldn’t be easier. You’re going to need to be able to do a couple of easy things. First, you need FTP access to your server, because you’re going to need to send a web page over. Secondly, you need some kind of text editor. I use TextMate on the Mac, you can use Notepad on Windows, or any number of text editors that are out there. And lastly, you’re going to have to know how to copy and paste. I know, I know… nobody said you needed a degree in Rocket Science to be able to do this… but it helps!

NOTE: Just to be clear, this Solution is designed to work with Google’s new Asynchronous Analytics Code. If you don’t know what that means, check this out and get back to us. It’s okay, we’ll wait right here for you.

Okay, sign into your Google Analytics account and grab your analytics code. To ensure that you’re using the right code, make sure the first line reads:

var _gaq = _gaq || [];

If it does, you’re using the right code. Now we’re going to create a very simple HTML page that you can paste this code into. In your text editor, open a new document and paste the following code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
  <title>Exclude My Visits!</title>
</head>
<!-- STEP TWO: Our One Line Piece of Code Goes In The Body Tag Below -->
<body >

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU WON'T BE COUNTED BY YOUR OWN GOOGLE ANALYTICS NOW! HOORAY! JUMP FOR JOY!
<!-- STEP ONE: Your Google Analytics Code Goes Right Below This Line -->

</body>
</html>

Save that page as something like, “exclude.html”. Go ahead, be imaginative, now’s your chance! Now, where it says, “STEP ONE”, copy your Google Analytics code and paste it right below that line.

Finished with that? Good, now for step two, and this one’s a doozy. Copy this line of code:

onLoad="javascript:_gaq.push(['_setVar', 'test_value']);"

Now, paste it right into that <body> tag RIGHT below “STEP TWO”. If you’ve done this correctly, your code should look like this:

<body onLoad="javascript:_gaq.push(['_setVar', 'test_value']);">

Save your work, and upload that to your server. You’re now done with step one.

The first part of our solution created a cookie in your browser. This page you’ve created does just that. In step two of our solution, we’re going to create a filter in Google Analytics that basically tells Google, “hey, whenever you see this cookie? Yeah, ignore it and don’t count the visit…”

For help on creating a filter, go here. It’s Google’s own Analytics Help that explains exactly how to do that if you’ve never done it before. You’re going to create a filter with the following settings:
Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: test_value
Case Sensitive: No

Notice the “Filter Pattern”? I’ve made it blue to match the code above because that’s the value that the cookie sets. Now, here’s the cool part.  You created a page called, “exclude.html” (or whatever your little heart desired) now go there! Once you visit that page, you’ll have the cookie, and when your filter is implemented you’ll be excluding yourself (well, that browser) from registering any visits in your Google Analytics!

Yay!

Make sure you visit that page anytime you “clear your cookies”! Send the URL to that page to anyone you want to exclude and sleep well at night knowing your numbers are safe.

Sweet Dreams!

Filed Under: Development & Design Tagged With: , , , ,

“Location Based Social Media” or, “Yeah, I beat that game…”

August 2, 2010 By 3 Comments

So I started using Foursquare a while back. I suppose I chose it over Gowalla because it seemed, at the time, like Foursquare had more going on. More people, more momentum, more fun. I gotta be honest too, I was really enjoying it.

Then my video game attention span kicked in.

Now it’s like Super Mario Galaxy 2. I played it. I liked it. I beat it. I sent it back to Gamefly.

Seems like that’s the problem with making “Social Media” and “Location Based Services” like a game, eventually you beat them and you move on, looking for the next thing to engage you. I can see how LBS (Location Based Services) are a perfectly logical blend of social media and cell phone portability. You have a smart GPS-enabled device right there in the palm of your hand, and it’s already been demonstrated ad nauseum that people want to share… a LOT. But at a certain point it feels like all those worlds collide, and not in a good way. Some time in the last couple of weeks I came to the simultaneous conclusion that, A) I was tired of “checking into” every place, and B) I wasn’t really enjoying the idea of letting everyone know where I was every minute of the day, and C) I squeezed about as much fun and enjoyment out of the “game” of Location Based Services that I could, and I was ready to move on.

Don’t get me wrong. I still think it’s “all about location”, but now, for me, it’s more about information. Fast, reliable, location-based information. I’m sure I’ll still get an urge to “check in” to someplace if I’m out of town, at a conference or something, but haven’t I checked into my gym and The Gap enough?

So where am I turning to more and more? Google Maps, that’s where. With the last series of updates to Google’s Android Maps app, I’ve noticed that they’re doing a great job of telling me where is the best place to get that certain item or service I’m looking for. Oh sure, there are social “check in” features and “share this with your friends” features that I’ll probably use when I’m really passionate about something, but more often than not, I just want to find the closest place with the best organic peanut butter… and I don’t really care if my friends know or not.

Filed Under: Advertising, Development & Design, Fun and Frivolous, Personal Tagged With: , , ,