It got me thinking about the driving force behind this blog: happiness and the web. The article doesn’t mention the web, but for almost 15 years, the web has been a bulwark of happiness for me. In the early days, it was a release from a difficult situation and the tendrils of despair. At times I even wonder if the web saved me. Now it’s part of what conference experts label “sustainable eudaemonia.” In other words, these days (with the bad years long gone) it remains a sure way to augment everyday peace of mind with happiness. And that’s with it now being my day job. Wonder of wonders.
But what is it that works this magic for me? It’s not surfing, and it’s certainly not email. It’s not hardware, nor software much either. Rather I notice it most in two ways.
First is the sheer wonder of the things people do with the web — and how it’s there to be shared. Humanity takes the bedrock of web standards, and from them creates the most astonishing things: elegant web apps like Backpack and Google Analytics, clever communication tools like change.gov and Twitter, everyday fare like RSS feeds and handsome sites, and most of all, the powerful search engines and knowledge banks that tie this super-abundance together.
But even more, I can feel that surge of happiness in the act of creation — when I jump into the web not as a spectator, but as a participant — when I’m building websites. It doesn’t matter if it’s for myself or for others. Nor does it matter if it’s a new site or an overhaul of an old site. It’s the fusion of HTML, scripts and databases; it’s the rhythm of code, save, refresh; it’s learning the latest techniques; it’s catching an unexpected glimpse of a site I helped build; it’s the teamwork and appreciation of others. And it’s other evanescent aspects…. “A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud.”
So fleeting, but so sure.
And you? Does the web bring you happiness? I’d love to know.
Other Analytics Resources (in no particular order)
Analytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic: Mashable, June 2007
Extensive links of analytics and related usability tools, grouped into five categories: (1)
Web traffic visualization, (2) Blog and RSS Feed Analysis, (3) Market Research Data and Site Rankings, (4) Analytics Software Packages, (5) Log File Analysis
How my dad would have loved Obama. He rebelled against his staunch Republican family when in high school, plastering FDR posters around his high school. Later, his cause became Africans and then African-Americans. We moved to Nashville so he could teach at Fisk. And how he loved technology. I am my father’s daughter.
I never imagined that a presidential campaign would make me remember him so much. And yet it does. Today it comes in the form of wonder.
It takes great management support to build a great website. Obama has a brilliant web team, but I have no doubt that his understanding of the web plays an enormous role in how successfully he uses it.
For me, and I hope for others, it cuts the media wall away. While I doubt I will ever come face to face with Obama, nonetheless between his books and his web presence I have a much better sense of who he is. Josiah Bartlett aside, all other presidents have had a distant cardboard feel — even Johnson and Nixon, whom I did see in person.
I always wondered about my father’s FDR worship and my grandfather’s FDR loathing. Now I see more clearly. And I hear Obama’s call to help each other through this economic crisis. What can I do to help?
Have you ever heard of the Tenneessee College Public Relations Association (TCPRA)? Me either. It turns out they’re a delightful group that enjoys each other’s company enough to meet twice a year. For their latest gathering they were in search of someone familiar with Google Analytics and happened upon me.
I expected it would be beautiful in upper east Tennessee (Harrogate, to be precise) this time of year, but I underestimated. It was breathtaking. I can see why that part of the world breeds authors. But more than that, the TCPRA people were delightful. Belmont University had a large contingent of their PR staff, with wonderful inside stories about the historic Belmont08 Debate, while Sam Watson of the Johnson City Press had an upbeat prognosis for their newspaper business. Astonishing. A newspaper that’s not at death’s door? They’ve embraced Web 2.0 and are making a go of it.
To TCPRA members (Doug Williams, in particular), thank you for including me. I promised I’d post my slides, so here they are. I’m not sure they’ll be much use out-of-context, but a promise is a promise — and in the next few days, I’ll also post a list of my favorite Google Analytics resources for you.
Google accounts are confusing. Marvelous, mind you, but nonetheless confusing. The most common mix-up I run across is people thinking their “gmail account” is just that. In fact, it’s much more. That same user name and password can give you access to Google Documents, Google Reader, Google Calendar, and a host (so to speak) of other rich and fruity Web 2.0 appolicatons. — even Blogger. Your “gmail account” is in fact your Google Account.
Understanding this a wonderful thing, unless you slip into thinking it’s the only type of Google account. This is where I fell into trouble. There’s at least one other: a Google Analytics Account. Your Google Account can give you access to multiple Google Analytics Accounts. And people can share administrative rights to the same Google Analytics Account. Can you blame me for getting confused?
Specifically, I ran afoul setting up Google Analytics for my church. After getting comfortable with it at work, a few months later I set up what I thought was a separate set of analytics for my church. Wrong. In fact I’d set up a “profile” of my work’s account for my church. Church and state. Hmmmm….. But the important point is that profiles are subsets of a Google Analytics account, and if you want to share administrative rights to that account, you share all profiles.
Now it’s a very good idea to share administrative rights to your Google Analytics accounts, assuming the website is not just yours. But could I share this hybrid account with anyone at work or at church? Well, actually I could have. There is one member of my church whom I work with, but I don’t think he would have been happy with this faux solution or with me.
Given that my church had much less data and need for the data, that account was the one to go. What I did was set up a separate account for my church and uploaded the new tracking code. The next day I checked to be sure the second account was working. It was, so I exported a boatload of PDFs from the old account – essentially archiving this data in case we ever need it in the future. And now all is well.
Meanwhile, a picture being worth all of the words above, here is a quick graph of Google Accounts vs. Google Analytics Accounts vs. Google Analytics Profiles. May it prevent you from falling into the same trap.
Boagworld, my favorite web developer podcast, has a juicy forum topic active right now — tips for new web designers. Here’s more or less what I wrote for it.
1. Learn as much as you can – and plan on keeping that up for the rest of your professional life. You can learn in whatever way suits you best. My preferred venues are books for new skills and RSS feeds for staying on top of the latest. But some like online tutorials, others classes, and still others prefer trial-and-error.
2. Devote time almost every day to following web design technologies and trends. RSS feeds, Twitter, email newsletters…. Again it’s whatever suits you best. Just don’t overwhelm yourself. Whenever I subscribe to a new RSS feed, I unsubscribe from another.
3. Understand the main skills involved in creating an excellent website. You certainly don’t have to master them all, but it’s good to have a grasp on what they really are and how they overlap. The primary skills for almost all sites are content creation, standards-based coding, design, and keeping the site current. For larger sites, they expand to project management, programming and information architecture.
4. Of these skills, know your strength in each. In areas where you’re weak, either work with someone who has them or develop them in yourself.
5. Follow your passion. There are many ways to grow within web development, so once you have basic mastery in the broad range of skills (within your abilities, of course), develop yourself in the areas that interest you most.
BarCamp Nashville. Such an unlikely place for my demographic. Heaven knows I had my doubts as I hauled myself out of bed at the crack of dawn on a gorgeous Saturday in October. But I told myself I could leave right away if it didn’t feel right, and ended up staying until close to the end.
For those of you scratching your heads, saying WhatWhat Nashville, I sympathize. Personally, I don’t do bars or camping. That leaves Nashville, and there’s a lot in Nashville I don’t do either. If I hadn’t gotten so much out of its kindred event, PodCamp Nashville, I wouldn’t have even considered it. But it turns out it’s an open source geek fest – somewhere between a formal conference for gear-heads and a happening.
Highlights for me:
The people. Lots of smiling, friendly techies. The majority young… male… white… etc. But still a good representation of females, plus a modest representation of boomers, and, more significant, a sense of welcome for all.
Great schwag. Is that how you spell it? My generation once called this stuff freebies. I’d brought my knitting in my backpack, but immediately transferred it to the excellent tote. It’s a keeper.
Decent coffee, plus unsweet ice tea (my favorite) and yummy muffins.
Hanging out with my web diva buddies. They came in force.
Fabulous presentation on Public Relations 2.0 (“The Deer Have Guns Now”). If I don’t see it recapped elsewhere, I’ll do it myself.
Things I hope to see next year:
More women speakers (not just in a session about women in technology, though that was a great start).
Same venue. Parking aside, I liked it more than PodCamp’s Cannery Ballroom.
Sessions on Drupal. If there were any, I couldn’t tell. But the site was done in Drupal and Centre{Source} was one of the main sponsors, so perhaps there were and I missed them.
Speaking of sponsors, egad were they generous. The whole thing was free, and they had wonderful prizes. So while I don’t usually do this, here’s a shout out to the sponsors I remember (in no particular order):
And of course a big round of applause for all the people who made this happen. You all don’t just rock. You are movers and shakers. I’m even giving Twitter a second chance, thanks to you.
*For those wondering about #bcn08, it’s a Twitter thing.
At the eleventh hour, I joined Vanderbilt’s task force reviewing search engines to use for the university. That was about a month ago, and I’m most grateful to have been included. It’s true I’m an iPhone fan-girl, an RSS evangelist, a Drupal enthusiast, etc., etc., but in the end what matters to me most are search engines. Once a librarian, always a librarian.
Vanderbilt’s search engine contract is up for renewal, and rather than rubber-stamping the current solution, the university opted to review four contenders: IBM, Google Search Appliance (GSA), Microsoft Search Engine and Ultraseek. IBM pulled itself out of the running a couple of weeks ago and Microsoft was fraught with technical problems. Just trying to look at it for 10 days in a row, I could never see it — not even once.
Thus the decision came down to Ultraseek, our current search engine, vs. Google Search Appliance. Aside from financial considerations, we based our analyses on three categories.
1. Technical. This encompassed things such as how difficult it was for the IT team to set up and what kind of support they will get if it crashes.
2. Administrative. From the perspective of those who administer the search engine (in particular our university webmaster), we looked at how intuitive the interface was, how much control it gave over the end results, and how it accommodated separate instantiations and templates for large divisions within Vanderbilt that need their own search engine.
3. End User. Most important of all, we assessed the effectiveness of the results. How likely would users be to find what they are looking for?
I don’t have administrative rights to Ultraseek, so I was only able to review it as an end user. Because of this, I won’t be reviewing it, except to say that I have used it as a Vanderbilt webmaster for seven or so years, and have been surprisingly happy with it, particularly how it can be adapted for subsites. The search results, when tuned properly by the administrators, have been decent. I would give it a B overall from an end user perspective. When searched in combination with classic Google using the “site:vanderbilt.edu” string, I can almost always find what I’m looking form. To help end users of the site I administer, I set up an advanced search page that easily allows them to do the same.
Google Search Appliance: The Good and the Not-so-good – or – Even Google Isn’t Perfect
Google Search Appliance (GSA), on the other hand, I was allowed to administer, and thus the majority of this review is an analysis of GSA. It’s a very strong contender to replace Ultraseek.
Jumping to the conclusion and then working backwards, I gave GSA the lowest marks of anyone on the task force. There’s some irony here. I’m a huge Google fan. Google classic has been my search-engine-of-choice since it launched ten years ago. I started using it even before my other librarian friends did. Not only that, I’d been sprinkled by Google Bus fairy dust just this Thursday and was wearing their t-shirt while the task force was in deliberations. But weighing the pros and cons, in the end I judged it to be about equal with Ultraseek. My fellow task force members were notably more enthusiastic than I.
In many ways, it was difficult to compare the two. In particular, Google is more likely to continue improving in the near future, but this is hard to quantify. They’ve made many improvements in the last couple of years, and promise several more soon, giving it a very slight edge. All told I gave it the equivalent of a B+. Here’s a breakdown.
CON
Relevance Rankings. To my surprise, the default order of GSA’s search engine results seems random or worse. I tested using Vanderbilt-based search terms where I’m very familiar with the results on a variety of search engines, internal and external. As best I could tell the GSA results were ranked primarily by their domain names — using the order these domains were crawled. Thus searches for even a cancer term typically listed all vanderbilt.edu results before any vicc.org results. (NB: vicc.org is Vanderbilt’s cancer center, with the most authoritative cancer information at Vanderbilt for patients.)
De-duplications of Pages. Ultraseek natively handles duplicate pages better than GSA. GSA, for example, pulls two versions of the exact same page — the original plus a “larger text” query string. Thus it will show both (1) www.vicc.org/dd/dz/results.php?id=34 and (2) www.vicc.org/dd/dz/results.php?q=textlarger&id=34, where Ultraseek automatically only shows the first. In theory a webmaster can control this with the robots.txt file, but I followed GSA’s instructions for doing this over four days ago, and either the crawler still hasn’t reindexed or the instructions were misleading, because I still see many of these duplicates.
UNKNOWN
Speed. Assessing GSA was particularly challenging since our test was running on older, remote machines. This meant it was much slower. Not only were the results slower than they will be if we purchase GSA, but so was the reindexing. How fast will it be if we buy it? To get a sense, I went to other comparable institutions that have purchased GSA. Yale.edu is a good example. I searched cancer terms there, and they pull up quickly. However, this method only helped for search results. It’s impossible to tell how quickly their sites reindex. And this can be an important issue for a search engine adminstrator, since sometimes you have to get rid of particular results quickly. Having to wait a day, or heaven help us, four days, is simply not acceptable.
Meta-data handling. Another big unknown is GSA’s upcoming improvements to relevance rankings. We were told the next version will allow the administrator to tune results based on meta data. If true, this will help the relevance ranking problems a great deal.
PRO
Number of pages indexed. In just a few weeks, the GSA crawler found 20 million files on vanderbilt servers. Ultraseek only crawls 38,000 files. Presumably some of this reflects Ultraseek’s de-duplication, but the number is so different, it clearly demonstrates that GSA has the potential to find much more. This will be particularly important if we deploy the search engine to our intranets.
Authentication, HIPAA and FERPA. To quote Stanford, another GSA user: “As FERPA and HIPAA regulations begin to have an effect on the availability of web content (requiring some pages to be access-restricted, for example), the campus search appliance can be authenticated to crawl and index where outside search engines cannot.” I’m not sure precisely what this means, but it sounds both significant and promising. From talking to our GSA rep, I believe it signifies that GSA will work well on things like our Medical Center intranets, assuming we have our websites’ authentication set up properly.
The Administrative Interface is intuitive and easy to use. Here is a screen-shot of the home page.
The Documentation and Help Screens for administrators are thorough.
Synonym-handling is much more sophisticated than Ultraseek’s. Out-of-the-box GSA’s search results include “Narrow your search” terms that seem almost magical to me. Search “sarcoma” and it will suggest terms such as “kaposi sarcoma.” Even more wonderous, you can add taxonomies such as the ICD-10 to your search engine.
Results can by customized in many and multiple ways. Results can be grouped in various collections (e.g. a Medical Center collection as well as a University collection), plus webmasters of individual departments can add search boxes to their sites that are restricted to just their URL. For look-and-feel, the results are typically XML using style sheets. Again, you can have different style sheets for different units.
Google caché. Google isn’t just familiar to your average web user. It’s the most trusted brand on the ‘net, and that trust was earned by their search engine. When Vanderbilt users aren’t happy with the current search engine, they will often ask, why aren’t you using Google instead? If we get GSA, we will be — at least in their eyes. The vast majority won’t know or care that the formula we’re using is necessarily different.
That’s it for my analysis of Google Search Appliance. It’s been a blast getting to peek under the hood of a search engine — especially the progeny of the most popular and sophisticated search engine in the world. I certainly hope I can do more of this in the near future. Oh — and did I mention it’s actually — get this — cute? In person, it’s a cheese-like yellow box. I think I want one for me too, but starting at $30,360.95 methinks I can’t afford it. Here’s hoping Vanderbilt can.
O shades of my gladsome youth…. A decked out school bus drove into town today. But it wasn’t a flower-power caravan led by Stephen Gaskin. It was Google, visiting Vanderbilt students to discuss Google Apps. Read all about it on the Google Student Blog. Or see the video of their presentation on VUCast.
And here are a few photos from this leg of their journey. There weren’t many students around at this point. Just lots of my geeky friends. That could be because it was 9:30 in the morning.
This post is for my favorite physical therapist in the universe. He’s had an iPhone for over a year, but has yet to download a single app. Can you believe it? Me… I fell even more in love with my iPhone last July when the App Store launched.
Brain Tuner
This little gem takes the pain out of keeping your gray cells fit. And it’s free. Just do 20 simple arithmetic problems as fast as you can. (Hint to fellow boomers: don’t compare your best time with that of your children. While you want your progeny to be smarter than you, it can be a tad humiliating to discover just how much more so they might be.)
Recorder
When you have an idea but no time to write it down, just switch on this ultra-simple app and make a quick recording. It’s $0.99 well invested. (More warnings, though. Your first $0.99 payment gives your credit card to Apple. You are then on the slippery slope of temptation to much more expensive goodies.)
Google
Think Google desktop for your iPhone. It searches not just the web á la Google Classic, but everything on your iPhone, including contacts and calendar. Free.
DataCase
Do you have Word, Excel, PDFs, audio files, etc., you’d like to quickly put on your iPhone? With DataCase, you just drag and drop without having to sync. All that’s needed is wireless. And $6.99.
Bejeweled 2
At $7.99, this is overpriced, but I confess, I love it. It’s such nice mindless stuff — and it sparkles. Moreover, unlike Brain Tuner and some other apps, it’s never crashed on me.
In the running for my favorites, but I still haven’t tested enough….
Wurdle
I love word games, and this $2.99 Boggle knock-off has the potential to hook me in a big way.
BarCamp Nashville.
