• On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    This week’s internet cruising: Christopher Hawkins – Necessary Rudeness and the Effective Use of Your Time – I love this: "I will go so far as to say that if you are not 100% unavailable for at least 2 hours a day, you probably aren't getting much done that's of any importance." I like the idea of saying, "5 minutes now or 30 minutes by appointment later," but unfortunately, everyone I work with thinks their stuff will only take 5 minutes. …I don't understand that. Christopher Hawkins – 11 Clients You Need To Fire Right Now – My favorite line: "We're white-collar professionals, not street thugs." Nuff said. Fo' sho.…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    This week’s internet cruising: Ottawa school board to ask students if they are gay – The Globe and Mail – This is a little weird. Ottawa is going to ask parents of elementary students and middle/high school students themselves about their sexual orientation. Toronto evidently did this already, and "students weren't bothered by it". How to Protest the TSA and Ruin Thanksgiving in One Easy Step — The Good Men Project Magazine – "Oh, and November 24 is the day before Thanksgiving—one of the busiest travel days of the year. That means anyone who chooses to dodge those full-body radiation sarcophagi of X-rated mayhem will gum up the security line…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    This week’s internet cruising: Living Like a Millionaire on Pennies a Day – "Now, I’m not talking about racking up thousands of dollars in consumer debt, or buying fancy cars and houses. I’m talking about something more valuable than that: having time. The only pre-requisite to living like a millionaire is being able to overcome your fear of uncertainty." Google: Google Street View Cars Sniffed Wi-Fi Networks | News & Opinion | PCMag.com – "Google Inc said its fleet of cars responsible for photographing streets around the world have for several years accidentally collected personal information that consumers send over wireless networks." Good job, Google. I'd completely slept on this…

  • Uncategorized

    Excluding Hits from Google Analytics

    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…

  • Uncategorized

    Search-building: custom or Google

    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…