DragonStyle

Damon Cooper's BLOG

Damon Cooper, a former colleague of mine at Macromedia (who now runs the ColdFusion team) has a blog.  With his visiblity, it should be clear that he is the guy to talk to if you're trying to figure out what the deal is with ColdFusion.

Here's one update on ColdFusion- it's still kicking ass more then 10 years later!

Link to Damon Cooper's BLOG

Google Analytics Swings at Measure Map

Google Analytics launched today, and one of the interesting question that occurred to me right away was whether I should use this to track traffic to this blog (not that there is a lot to track just yet). I also run the website for Onfolio, so it occurred to me to give it a try there as well, but I'm a little too conservative to just dump new analytics at our site. Has anyone else out there started using Google Analytics for a site that is something larger than a hobby?

Google took the wrapper off Analytics today. It is a rebranding of their Urchin acquisition from earlier this year.

It works in much the same way as MeasureMap - using it requires the addition of javascript into a couple of files on your blog. It has deep integration into Adwords as well.

Google Analytics is mostly free (up to 5 million page views per month), or completely free if you are an adwords user.

Registration for Analytics is currently suspended but I’ll be doing a full side by side review against Measure Map in the next day or two. The screen shot provided by Google (to left) is encouraging.

One thing I’d like to understand is whether Google Analytics takes a holistic approach to blog analytics like Measure Map does, or whether it is a more generic application for measuring general website statistics. Measure Map is awesome at monitoring traffic at the post and comment level and has used flash and Ajax integration in a very intelligent way.

More on the Meme.

Tags: google, googleanalytics, measuremap, adaptivepath, techcrunch, web2.0, web+2.0, analytics

Google Analytics Swings at Measure Map
Originally Posted on 11/14/2005 2:53 PM
by Michael Arrington
TechCrunch

Justin’s Rich Media Blog » Maps that are Consistent with YOUR design

Pretty awesome capabilites for altering the appearance of Yahoo Maps. Perhaps this is an example of Flash applications having an advantage over AJAX?

Link to Justin’s Rich Media Blog » Maps that are Consistent with YOUR design

Fake Apologies

Ok who else is sick of fake apologies that use terms like 'may have been offensive' to try to shed responsibility. If someone wants to apologize for something, it shouldn't be conditional or apologizing for something that may have been. You're apologizing for something or you're not.

To McNabb, Owens said, "I apologize to him for any comments that may have been negative."

Link to ESPN.com - NFL - T.O. apologizes, but Eagles won't take him back

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Using Flock for blogging

Scoble asks whether the world will someday be populated with browser for specialized purposes, a la, Flock. I have to say I just don't see it- particularly when IE and Firefox have pretty flexible mechanisms for creating add ons and extending their functionality.  Why would I as a user prefer a whole new browser, when instead, I could just add a few tools to my browser and achieve the same thing, all the while keeping the familiar and customized browsing experience that I have grown used to?

In the case of Flock, the question becomes, what does the fact that it is a distinct browser add over a set of Firefox tools (perhaps even a single Firefox extensions that adds those capabilities to Firefox as it stands today)?

Defender- good name or bad name?

I was the engineering manager on the Allaire Spectra and during the early development of the 1.0 version, it was code named 'Defender.' (Allaire was on a jag of Video Game code names.) Long story short, 'Defender' got dumped as a code name as we were approaching public beta- the feeling was that the name sounds too defensive, that people would wonder who we were defending against. We shipped the beta with the code name 'Tempest' and that was that. 

As a side note- we demo'd an alpha version of Spectra to a number of partners at one point, and each partner got a 'Defender' duffle bag. If I'm not mistaken, that is the only remaining evidence that the 'Defender' name ever existed...

Filed under: Windows, Commercial, MicrosoftMicrosoft seems to be on something of a product renaming jag lately, swapping Longhorn for Vista, MSN Messenger for Windows Live Messenger and Start for Live. The latest: Windows Anti-Spyware is now Windows Defender. According to the development team: "The name, after long consideration by our product marketing and branding folks, is 'Windows Defender'! What's really cool about this name is that it’s more positive than 'Windows AntiSpyware'. Windows Defender is about what Windows will do for customers, defending them from spyware and other unwanted software." Whatever. All I know is I've got an image of the old arcade game of the same name in my head now, and I doubt that's what Microsoft wanted.
 

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Protect yourself with Windows Defender!
Originally Posted on 11/7/2005 12:54 PM
by Marc Perton
Download Squad

Massive Frontal PR is incompatible with Ship Early and Often

Joel on Software complains of the same problem as well. I can't believe that they missd this!

Microsoft's new (beta!) portal page, live.com, doesn't work in Firefox, and doesn't work too great in IE either. The first thing I used it for was to search for "firefox market share."

Like every search engine, you get a list of search results. I clicked on the first one, read the article, and then clicked "back" to find the next result.

Oops! What happened to the search results?

Massive Frontal PR is incompatible with Ship Early and Often
Originally Posted on 11/2/2005 10:37 AM
by spolsky@panix.com (Joel Spolsky)
Joel on Software

Live.com - full of Ajaxy badness?

I have been playing with Windows Live this morning - it is interesting and a real improvement over the old start.com. They have worked hard to create an interactive experience that avoids the dreaded page reload (can someone explain again why everyone is trying to avoid that in obvious situations?). This can be nice, streamlining some experiences, but it has a real downside- one that is pretty destructive in this case.

Consider the following use case:

1. Do a search for a term like 'Onfolio'
2. Scan the results, click one of the results to view the page
3. Click the back button to return to the list of search results

What you'll find is that you aren't back on the search results, instead you're on the homepage again (with your search term in the search box, but no search results to be found). Try figuring out how to email a friend a search result page from live.com- I have no idea how to do this now!

One of the critical things that used to come for free with web application is the browser navigation- forward, back, etc... As rich internet applications gain traction, maintaining this behavior is going tol pose a real challenge for developers as they are now creating single url state machines whose states may not even be addressable by a url. What a disaster for users- forget bookmarks, emailing a friend a URL, using the back button, all things that helped make the web great. 

I've run into this problem with a large number of the rich internet apps that I've used- things like Google reader, Gmail, and now live.com. And here's the thing- I'd rather have the page reload round trip if it means I get stateful Urls back.