Woo hoo. I'm quite excited.
Once again, I'll be checking out Dear Leader, this time live from the Paradise. Aaron Perrino's new band is quite good. You should come see them too.
Google Analytics -- How to Blow a First Impression
Over the weekend, word leaked out that Google was launching a free web analytics package. This was pretty cool news. If you've ever messed around with a web analytics product (WebTrends, ClickTracks, even Site Meter), you know you can get some handy information beyond just "5 people visited my site yesterday." At my last job, I spent a whole lot of my time using ClickTracks to do log analysis to try to determine how effective search campaigns were, if landing pages for marketing materials were working well, where people were falling out of the site when trying to sign up for one of the products they sold.
Now that I've moved on to my new job, I'm looking at web analytics from a different perspective -- trying to figure out how to deliver it to our customers. We've been looking at a couple of alternatives, to move beyond the standard "here are your logs, we'll run Webalizer for you, or you can do something yourself." When I heard about Google Analytics, I made a note to check it on Monday.
Monday rolls around and Google puts out the official announcement of Google Analytics. I get there early Monday morning and the site is swamped and barely responsive. Hmm. How can you underestimate demand for a free web product aimed at web users? I was able to get through and sign up to track some sites, and I threw the little bit of Javascript onto a couple of pages (not here, however; I want to give Google some time to settle down before I try tracking anything more substantive than a single page). It said to expect results in 12 hours.
12 hours later? Nada.
24 hours later? Nada.
36 hours later? Nada.
48 hours later? Holy crap, it works.
2 days to start returning statistics for something that launched on Monday. All the while, not a peep from Google, who have this bizarre affinity for not commenting when things aren't going well. You'd think they'd follow up on the GoogleBlog with a "Hey, we really underestimated demand, so we're adding servers as fast as we can. Expect it to be ready on Wednesday." Then I wouldn't have kept checking in and wondering why I should even consider using it.
Now, of course, why complain about something that's free? Well, because it's not free. Google is giving me a product in exchange for my data, which they use to grow their massive revenue. Gmail is free, and in exchange, they put ads next to my mail. The search engine is free, and in exchange, they put ads next to my search results. My former blog home of Blogger is free, and in exchange, they get a place to put more ads. See where I'm going? None of it is free. Google is making billions from people's data. So it is not too much to expect them to get something right the first time. And why does blowing the first impression matter? Because right now, I'm helping to decide if we're going to point thousands of customers to Google for advanced analytics. Thousands of customers = lots of data for Google to gain more revenue from. Just because they launch these "free" web apps doesn't mean that they don't lose potential revenue when they have such awful launches (see Google Groups, Google Reader, Google Mail).
In the end, it looks like it's a pretty damn solid product. It's got all your normal metrics, in a handy interface (a good use of Flash, for a change). It seems to track everything you'd normally want to track, and the only downside is that you're sending your data out to Google. That could be a bit scary for companies who are doing eCommerce and what not (though they wouldn't have
to put the Javascript snippet on that page). For me, it's a minor haggle to get good web metrics, something I'll probably pay more attention to when I've finally built out the site a bit more.
ALIVE!!!!!
Finally.
I'm finally back up and running. Got around to getting my domain setup, setting up Wordpress, mucking with some themes (currently running Almost Spring, which I'm soon to tweak. Got the Netflix queue up and loaded on the right. Links coming soon too.
Now that I'm on my own platform, I can do a lot more stuff. Whether I will or not .. that remains to be seen. But I think I will.
Jobby Job
Things have been hectic since I actually got me employment. 1 week down: so far, so good. Still getting the hang of things, learning, but I think it'll work out.
Working on some stuff on the back end (getting web hosting/domain name/maybe moving to WordPress), so probably infrequent updates for a bit.
Oh, the new Harvey Danger album is good.
iTunes v5.0 Redux
I ended up spending a few hours yesterday cleaning up my iTunes library. Basically, when I first starting using iTunes (a couple of years ago), I didn't want it to control which songs it would sync to my iPod. I wanted control over that.
A couple of years pass and now my two libraries (the iPod and iTunes) are out of sync. When you manually update, iTunes doesn't bring play counts and last played data back from the iPod, so you lose some of the cool smart playlist abilities. It's bugged me for a while, almost to the point of writing a Perl script to update the data myself each time the iPod sync'd.
Instead, I figured I'd just spend some time merging my libraries. I started with CopyPod, which lets you merge your iPod library (play counts, ratings, etc.) back into iTunes. This, however, left me with an entire duplicate library. Thankfully, I could just sort by date added. Boom, dumped all the duplicates, leaving myself with a merged library.
How to control what songs sync to my iPod? I created a playlist called iPod Songs. This playlist contains all of the songs I want sync'd out to my iPod. Now, if I want to make a smart playlist that will work on my iPod, I just make sure it includes a criteria that the song exists on the iPod Songs playlist. Surprisingly, it works really well.
Finally, I figured I'd add album art in to iTunes. Found this nice app that will do it automagically by going out to Amazon and downloading the album art. It made a few mistakes, but 30 minutes of work cleaned that up.
So now I've got a single library, with both my normal iPod and my iPod Shuffle updating play counts. Now I can start adding some older CDs in and building out one big library, which was the plan all along.
The point: iTunes made all of this a pain, but once you get things working sort of the way iTunes likes it, it's a really good application. I'm a much bigger fan of the new interface and some of the abilities it has (playlist folders, particularly).
iTunes 5.0
iTunes 5.0 is out. It's got a slightly new interface, which I like.
It's packaged with Bonjour (for the PC). Apple never asked if I wanted this installed or running. They just install it and launch it without asking. That's not very nice. I don't think this was the case in older versions of iTunes, but I could be crazy.
It's still missing the big feature I need -- the ability to sync ratings and play counts back to the library from the iPod when using manual sync. It astounds me that it still doesn't have this. Bleh.
Otherwise, seems like a pretty minor upgrade. Not sure why it gets to be called 5.0. This is really like 4.95.
Music I've Been Digging
Since I've become jobless (hopefully ending soon), I've been listening to a ton more music. And spending a lot more money on music, which is counterintuitive, but whatever, I get bored.
So, here's some cool songs I've been listening to. This way you can be assured I'm a wannabe indie hipster minus any bone in my body being hip.
stellastarr* - Sweet Troubled Soul
It's the first single off stellastarr*'s (yes, that looks awfully weird) second album. It rocks. Their first album is one of my favorite albums of recent years and they rock live, so it's almost a given I'd like this song. But then it kicks so much more ass. All hard driving, while still showing the new wave-y influences. Awesome.
The New Pornographers - Sing Me Spanish Techno
One of the tracks of Carl Newman's newest pop masterpiece. It's just infectious. Between Carl Newman and Adam Schlesinger/Chris Collingwood, it's a wonderful time to be a fan of the pop music. Speaking of Fountains of Wayne ...
Fountains of Wayne - I'll Do the Driving
It's an older song that's gotten it's first release on the recent 2 CD set. It's pure FoW power pop with a huge hook, jangly guitars, and clever lyrics. I dig.
Hall & Oates - She's Gone
I'm so not even kidding. Saw a really good cover band at the Burren in Davis Sq. a couple of weeks back and they covered this, and I remembered how much I loved the Oates, so I grabbed the song from iTunes. Honestly, is it possible to not love this song? Really, is it possible?
The Decemberists - The Engine Driver
I don't think there's a song on the new Decemberists' album that's as good as 90% of the stuff off of "Castaways and Cutouts", but this is the closest, I think.
Ambulance, LTD - Stay Where You Are
It's a couple of years old now, but this song ages well. Soooo good.
Aaron Perrino - Every Year
I went and saw Aaron Perrino play a solo show a couple of months back and his solo version of his old band's "Every Year" was just plain awesome. His new band plays some shows at the start of September and I won't miss them.
I haven't heard any hip hop in the past few weeks that has blown my mind. I'm not a huge Kanye West fan, so I'm thinking the next time I hear a track that catches my ear it'll probably be off of the DJ DangerMouse/MF Doom/Adult Swim collaboration.
stellastarr* rocks my ass
Awesome NY band stellastarr* rocked my ass last night at the Middle East in Cambridge. I'm a little disappointed they didn't play my favorite track ("Somewhere Across Forever"), but I'll be damned if they don't put on the best live show of pretty much any band I've seen.
They rock and you should go see them and buy their CDs.
Me, I'm heading to bed slightly deaf but very happy. In the meantime, check out some cool pictures from flickr.
Oh, and here's my future wife for good measure:
(Photo from flickr)
Sometimes I remember why I like fat clients ...
As everything moves to the big bucket of bits that we call the internet, people get very accustomed to having access to their data wherever they have a browser. It's a wonderful thing.
Generally.
Then you get a time like now where all of a sudden you can't access your email for a while because someone at Google tripped over a power cord. That blows and makes you wonder if thin clients are really that much better.
Then it works again and you go back to living your little happy life until the next time someone spills coffee into a keyboard and you can't access your finances.
Job Spam
So, I've been doing the normal job hunting, updating my Monster resume, adding my resume into Yahoo! HotJobs, and checking some other job boards.
Within 24 hours of my resume hitting HotJobs, I got deluged with the usual spate of "financial advisor" and "make money at home" offers. Honestly, they're just thinly veiled spam. These are just spammed out offers -- there's no relevance to my resume or experience. These companies just have some agents that run and look for new resumes and then send out the spam.
It's not nearly as nefarious as normal spam, since they don't continually email you. But still, it's pretty annoying. I'm sure the same thing happens when you first post on Monster, but my resume has been on there for a while, so I don't remember.
Anyway, I'm pretty unimpressed with the whole HotJobs interface and experience. I just don't think it's nearly as effective as Monster right now. Then again, Monster has the wonderful habit of logging me out every day (even though I've checked to keep me logged in) and then forcing me to go through those stupid advertisment/signup forms that try to trick you into signing up for the Army.