Tags: astronauts serendipity random chance lottery

1 comment

Seen in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

No comments (yet)

The first problem was that Omniture's Javascript code is heavily obfuscated and optimized. All of the function names and variables use extremely brief and cryptic names, using one or maybe two characters, something that makes it extremely difficult to debug when you have a problem. Unlike an open source Javascript library like, say, jQuery, Omniture doesn't provide a development version of their library with reasonably named functions and variables, so if you've got a problem, you're stuck trying to figure out what function a and its variables x, y and z, are doing and what they're stomping on. And the stomping on is another problem; if you incorporate another minified library, like, say, the minified version of jQuery, some of those single-character-named functions or variables are going to conflict with the single-character-named functions or variables in Omniture's code. This could have been avoided if Omniture namespaced their code so it doesn't stomp on anything else and blow up your site (can you tell I've seen this happen more than once?) When we discovered this conflict, we wound up going with a slightly larger version of jQuery that doesn't create those functions and variables with the same names as the ones Omniture creates.

But the bigger problem we found is that Omniture's code is slow. Verrrrrrrry slow. On a tracked link, the Omniture code would do whatever it does (hard to tell what, exactly, because of the obfuscated code), and only when it was done would the default action of the link be triggered. So when you clicked on a tab in the tabbed interface, or on a link that would open up a modal window, links that were pretty much instantaneous on the development network and still extremely speedy on the staging server now took forever to activate, on the order of three or four seconds. This was really unacceptable from a user experience point of view, but from the client's perspective, the links had to be tracked. What to do? We could change the cursor to an hourglass and then change it back, but the link would still be slow to activate. Not good.

Omniture provided two possibilities for tracking links; the first was to add an id as part of a query string at the end of a link. This caused us problems in some cases, such as the tabs, because now links that were within a page and wouldn't cause the browser to reload the page, with the addition of the query string, now appeared to the browser to have different parameters from the originally loaded page, and so it would reload the page, bouncing users back to the default tab. That didn't work, so we tried their alternate syntax, which involved assigning one of their functions to the onclick event handler. That led to the above-mentioned slowing to a crawl.

In a conversation with the Omniture expert at work, I asked if it mattered if the id associated with a link were actually called by the page or if it could be called by another URL. The answer led to a solution. The id could be added to any URL, even, say, a 1×1 spacer GIF. (Finally, a justifiable use for a spacer GIF in modern code!) So we could make the onclick event handler call /images/x.gif?iid=page_identifier_here. Even better, we could call that URL asynchronously using Ajax. Since we were already using jQuery, all we had to do was to add a line like the following to the already existing (unobtrusively linked) onclick event handler:

$.get('/images/x.gif?iid=page_identifier_here');

This would send the call to the server that included the required Omniture tagging, but since the call was being executed with jQuery's Ajax get() function, the call was happening asynchronously, and the default actions could be triggered without waiting for a response. That restored the speedy user experience. But we found that once the asynchronous call was finished, whatever URL was in the href attribute would then reload, causing, for example, the tabs to once again bounce back to the default. So we had to define a callback function to be executed upon the completion of the Ajax request. Since we didn't want anything to happen at the completion of the request, the function is a simple return false:

$.get('/images/x.gif?iid=page_identifier_here',function(){return false});

Et voila, the client gets the tracking they require, and the user gets the experience they deserve. No longer does Omniture cause the interface to bog down.

If you're using any library other than jQuery, it's bound to have a similar function for asynchronous Ajax calls. If you're rolling your Javascript from scratch, such a call would look something like this:

function trackme(url,query) {
    // Native XMLHttpRequest object
    if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
        request = new XMLHttpRequest();

    // ActiveX XMLHttpRequest object
    } else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
        request = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
    }
    if (request) {
        request.onreadystatechange = function() { 
            return false; 
        };
        request.open("get", url, true);
        request.send(query);
    }
}

And then your onclick event handler would include something like this:

onclick="trackme('file.html','iid=page_identifier_here'); return false;"

The return false here is required to prevent the onclick from executing the default action of the href even before the Ajax request is returned.

Tags: omniture ajax jquery cleverosity

3 comments

Understandably, most of the musicians they present are Brazilian, only a few of whom have had international exposure (I've read about Mayra Andrade in fRoots magazine, for example). But occasionally there's someone from the wider world, like the Swedish indie singer/songwriter José Gonzalez. The English language web site is a bit behind the Portuguese language site, but they seem to be eager to get their videos out any way they can, so you can see them in a lot of places, such as their page on blip.tv. Good stuff, very cool.

Tags: music video pocketmusic musica de bolso wendy mcneill

No comments (yet)

This is the same Carly Fiorina who helped run Lucent into the ground. Then she went on to bigger and better things and screwed up Hewlett-Packard so badly that she was fired as their CEO. That Carly Fiorina?

Obama's going to win by a bigger landslide than I thought....

Tags: McCain McSame Fiorina Obama election advisors

2 comments

Coincidentally, we received a flyer yesterday from Verizon telling us that FIOS is now available in our neighborhood.

Tempting, very tempting.

Tags: comcast verizon lesser of two evils

4 comments

I'm sick and tired of dealing with this. I really ought to bill Adobe for all the hours I've wasted figuring this out. I can guarantee that I won't be spending another penny with Adobe or Filemaker as long as they treat their paying customers like criminals. Enough is enough. I've been a paying user of Photoshop since version 3.0 (since version 1.0 if you count my use at work). I've been a paying customer of Filemaker since it was owned by Nashoba Systems. No more. Not one more thin dime will they get from me as long as they're shipping crippled software.

Tags: adobe filemaker flexnet activation licensing piracy lack of respect

No comments (yet)

Tags: getting older 40 birthday

1 comment

(There Is No Cat will be back to it's usual dapper self tomorrow. Today, we show off the glory of our semantic markup.)

No comments (yet)

A couple of my favorite stores in my old stomping grounds of State College, Pennsylvania, get shout outs. Arboria is closed. I spent a lot of time and money there in my years in State College. My friend Josh, who did the blues program at the campus radio station where I worked, was the manager there. They carried mostly used stuff (all vinyl back then), but had one wall of new records. A lot of them were cheap imports of dubious quality from places like Italy. My first copy of The Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight was one of those. I certainly couldn't afford to pay for the UK import at the time. Arboria was great.

The owner of City Lights Records is quoted in the article. I'm glad to see they're still around, even if they're hanging on by a thread. They opened up in my last year in State College, around 1985. They focused more on new merchandise than used, so they were a nice complement to Arboria. I remember buying the first Yo La Tengo single there, before anyone had heard of them. I hadn't heard of them either, but they were from Hoboken, and that was good enough for me. The single wasn't even in the racks yet; it was in a pile of a dozen or so singles sitting on the counter that the owner hadn't gotten around to filing yet, just in that day.

As a fan of obscure music, I always found that the indie stores in college towns were the best places to go. I always made an effort whenever I travelled to seek them out. I guess that's not going to be such an effective tactic any more.

I think I'm going to have to make a music run to Other Music at lunch time....

Tags: record store arboria city lights music

8 comments