This week’s internet cruising:

• Seriously? – bitquabit –
  

  [H]e identified the Three “P”s of entrepreneurship:

  'Profits, people and…you can figure it out.'

  [Muttering amongst the audience.]

  'Women. People, profits, and women. Or men. Whatever. People, profits, and women.'

  No, no. He really means "Profits, people, and pussy." That shit's not funny.

• BBC World Service – Outlook, Neda Soltani: mistaken for a dead icon – Heard this story on NPR on an early, early morning drive to work. This was fucked up; it ruined her life in Iran and sent her fleeing to Germany to avoid (further) persecution by the Iranian government. Keep reading >>

If you want to exclude your own visits to your site from Google Analytics on a per-computer or per-session basis, searching will land you on Google’s help page: How do I exclude internal traffic from reports?. Problem is, the code there doesn’t work with Google’s new-ish asynchronous tracking code. There is no “pageTracker” object any longer, so that’ll throw a nice little error.

The replacement for “pageTracker” is to push the custom variable onto the _gaq object, per the new standards.

To get this working, make a new, simple HTML page, just including the basics to make the page validate. Include your standard-issue Google tracking code in the head, like so:
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Everything’s a day behind this week. I wanted these out yesterday. Anyway, here’s this week’s internet cruising:

• The Little Easy – OMG, can I move into this house, please? Please?
• White Bean and Onion Confit (recipe) – I'm totally going to try this. Healthy and yummy-sounding (although that's quite a bit of oil).
• Graphic Designer’s Journey: Freelance to Freedom (Infographic) – Apparently I'm on a freelance kick today. This totally resonated with me. As much as I like people, client work can be rough. It's hard to maintain the cheerful and patient "service industry" outlook 40 hours a week. It feels much more satisfying to do your own work or select volunteer work, especially if you think your work has redeeming social value.
• Aggressive Expansion: 8 Tips for Finding More Clients Now – I saw a lot of these techniques (sans the job boards) used to good effect at Skookum. Were I to go into freelancing, this would be an awesome guide. It's good anyway.
• Winning a User Experience Debate – "To bring UX to the heart of the business, you must persuade colleagues to trust your opinion and expertise. Handling critique well is an important way to earn trust. It’s easy to undo your hard work with rash disagreement. Never dismiss stakeholder feedback out of hand."
• YouTube – Speed Up Your Iphone backup with Itunes – Easily done. I was having 1+ hour syncs. Here I was (apparently) trying to be nice, sending in diagnostic info.
• Reader Story: How I Purchased Private Health Insurance – I've thought about going independent myself with health insurance, just so that I won't be shackled by a job. That said, some companies offer better benefits than I'd want to pay for out of pocket, especially since I do need more than just preventative care on a regular basis… This article explores a couple of good options.
• 22 seconds of joy – A confused puppy.
• POD is Bad Business – An interesting perspective on publish-on-demand. It hinges on writers wanting their books on bookstore shelves. I'm not sure the argument holds as much water if you care more about online sales through Amazon (etc.).
• Buttersafe – The Portrait – I almost peed my pants on this one.

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This week’s internet cruising:

• How to keep someone with you forever – "You create a sick system." I wanted to cry when I read this.
• Looking Back — Discord&Rhyme – "To be successful at bootstrapping, you have to cut every feature except those you think are absolutely necessary. Then you cut some that you thought that you absolutely had to have. You compromise your design because you need to get the product to market. You ignore automated testing and documentation because your code is too unstable to be held back by rigorous processes."
• Launching beta, or “How to decide when and where to cut corners” –
• 200+ Seamless Patterns Perfect for Website Backgrounds – Pretty! They're a bit busy, but I think they could be used tastefully.
• Statement by Apple on App Store Review Guidelines – Courtesy of Greg. Apple seems to be getting off their high horse with regards to development tools. I'm not sure yet if this means I'll be springing for Plants vs. Zombies on the iPhone.
• These Dance Moves Are Irresistible – ScienceNOW – Courtesy of Michael. "The most important factor to the women was how much the man moved his head, neck, and torso, the researchers will report online tomorrow in Biology Letters." This is a really cool-sounding study. Thinking about the types of dancing I like to watch and see done well–hip-hop, even bellydance–I like fancy foot-work, but tight (pop and lock) torso and head movements do draw my eye more. Flailing arms are just hilarious.
• Action Not Words: The Difference Between Talkers and Doers – Wonderfully (and miserably) timely for me. The last few weeks for me have been very slothful (as evidenced by the lack of posts here), with correspondence and projects piling up while I squander my time. I've taken to returning to my 3 Most Important Things per day. If I get nothing else done in a day, I will get whatever those three things are done. I know from experience that having the 3 MITs builds momentum so that I'll rarely only ever get those three things done.
• We’re Not Paid To Write Code – This is a really well-written article on how we're paid to deliver a product, not sling code. This is a hard-won lesson for every comp sci major worth their weight I've ever met in their first 2 years out of college, myself included. I'm still not great at balancing quality vs. out-the-doorness on personal projects, but I've learned a lot more about what's acceptable business-wise.

Until earlier this week, I had a lousy site search in place. It was one of Google’s Custom Search Engines, barely configured and only on its own page, due to it’s hefty (and blocking!) JavaScript. I’d long since disabled WordPress’s search since my stories aren’t being run in WordPress, and I didn’t feel like trying to chew on the internal search mechanisms to include the stories.

Last week, I started playing around with a project to create my own (Python) site search, including a crawler and Whoosh-based search. I’d seen the implementation of a Lucene search in Zend go fairly easy-peasy, and liked the idea of a self-hosted search.

Problem is–well, one of the problems is–the crawl time for a site with 1200 posts (most of which are low-priority) is a deal-breaker on a shared hosting provider. It takes far longer than 5 minutes just to collect the links, even with multiple threads. Add the parse time to get indexable content for 1200 pages, and I was stuck contemplating how to crawl and index the site in parts.

This sounds like a great, fun, project. …Except that it’s already been done and I have other things I’d rather be doing. Google did it; their index for my site updates surprisingly quickly and doesn’t make me afraid that Dreamhost will smite me. (I’ve been with Dreamhost for several years now, and while I’ve learned how to properly deploy a site since moving here from… Brinkster, was it?, I don’t relish the idea of learning a new environment for all the stuff I run here.)

So instead of the 4-5 hours I’d spent screwing with the Ikea-esque assembly of a site crawler and search, I spent two this week really making Google’s Custom Search Engine (CSE) work for me. Yes, there are ads. Yes, it’s not a solution that I own. (Then again, neither is my email, in that sense.)
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