Detecting Google Universal Analytics
Just about everyone uses Google Analytics and why shouldn't they? The amount of useful data you can pull from Google Analytics, especially if you use custom dimensions, is amazing. Whether you're A/B testing, trying to increase engagement, or improve sales, Google Analytics is just about perfect.
I recently experimented with detecting external link clicks with the current version of Google Analytics called Universal Analytics. In doing so I realized that utilities like Ghostery blocked GA, which is fine, but they also shim the ga function that I was using to detect if the third party service was loaded. Damn. It turns out you need to do an additional check:
if(window.ga && ga.create) {
// Do you ga stuff
ga('send', 'pageview');
}
Checking for the Analytics's custom create method ensures that Google's utility is there and not simply shimmed by Ghostery or a likewise service!
![LightFace: Facebook Lightbox for MooTools]()
One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog. This "lightbox" isn't like others: no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much." With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace: a Facebook lightbox...
![Create a CSS Flipping Animation]()
CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...
![Create a Simple Slideshow Using MooTools, Part II: Controls and Events]()
Last week we created a very simple MooTools slideshow script. The script was very primitive: no events and no next/previous controls -- just cross-fading between images. This tutorial will take the previous slideshow script a step further by:
Adding "Next" and "Previous" controls.
Adding...
![Assign Anchor IDs Using MooTools 1.2]()
One of my favorite uses of the MooTools JavaScript library is the SmoothScroll plugin. I use it on my website, my employer's website, and on many customer websites. The best part about the plugin is that it's so easy to implement.
I recently ran...
> Just about everyone uses Google Analytics and why shouldn’t they?
Google Analytics is one of the key pieces of the Orwellian world which Google is building for us. Virtually every website puts this innocent looking piece of JavaScript on all their pages. It gathers people’s browsing habits and centralizes this information in Google’s data farms. That data end up being sold on the data market and refined by data brokers such as the Acxiom company or given away for free to intelligence agencies, as everyone is now aware of. I understand why you do it and I’m not blaming you, I used to do the same until I realized what I was contributing to by doing so. I hope you’ll agree that we should thrive to make the web a tool of freedom and not a weapon of control. It’s not that people at Google are bad either, it’s just that any company that grows so big fatally end up being dehumanized. Piwik works fine ;-)
Great, thanks for posting – this works well. After years of checking for
_gaqcomes to and end…