David Simpson

If your website contains Flash movies that link offsite or to microsites, you may wish to register the offsite link using WebTrends. This article provides an introduction. It assumes a little knowledge of ActionScript, Javascript as well as WebTrends.

This example uses a intermediary javascript function that sits between the Flash movies and the WebTrends code.

Benefits

• It’s much easier to debug if the WebTrends javascript is not called within the compiled Flash movie
• The WebTrends tracking can be changed later without recompiling the Flash movie or even speaking to your Flash developer

The slides from a presentation I’m giving today at the European Luminis User Group (ELUG) meeting at the University of Greenwich.

To find out which of the UK’s national newspapers has the best readability, I chose a news story at random that was recently covered in each of the newspapers.

I tested the readability of each newspaper’s article using my own online readability testing tool.

I’ve just released the first version of The Readability Testing Tool.   It takes either a supplied URI, or directly inputted text.

Indices measured

• Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease
• Flesch Kincaid Grade Level
• Gunning Fog Score
• Coleman Liau Index
• Automated Readability Index.

Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease is a scale of 0-100. A high score means the text is easier to read. Low scores suggest the text is complicated to understand. All the other indices are based on the US school grade level system.

Features

I’ve added features that aren’t available anywhere else.

1. Readability testing by referer.
   Allows you to add a link to the site on your blog, so that you can rapidly view the readability scores
2. Readability testing a specific part of the web page.
   If the article text in your blog is contained in e.g. div#content, this can be used to test only the article text.  This means that the result is not affected by the navigational elements.

This is a step by step guide for building a find nearest/store locator for free in PHP just like Postcode Anywhere.

It requires PHP and a mySQL database. That’s all.

You don’t need Google Maps, but it helped me populating the database, so I’ve included it for completeness. The example I’m using is UK based, but provided Google have a postcode/zipcode to lat/long convertor for your country, it should work nicely.

Since I last added Google Analytics to a website, Google have changed from the old urchin.js file to the shiny new ga.js file. This means that I really ought to start using ga.js now.

The University of Nottingham uses Sungard’s Luminis portal system which produces some rather nasty looking URLs. Web analytics for this is rather a handful – bad URLs, multiple features per page (each of which we’d like to track) and often tracking would be nice across sub-domains.

With that in mind, and Google’s Tracking Code Migration Guide close at hand, I’ve written jGoogleAnalytics.js to allow me to track:

• clicks events
• form submit events
• cross subdomain
• cross domain (e.g. for eCommerce payment gateways hosted externally)
• new organic search engines
• all the features of Jason Huck’s GA jQuery integration

Download jGoogleAnalytics.js