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!
![Create a Sheen Logo Effect with CSS]()
I was inspired when I first saw Addy Osmani's original ShineTime blog post. The hover sheen effect is simple but awesome. When I started my blog redesign, I really wanted to use a sheen effect with my logo. Using two HTML elements and...
![Designing for Simplicity]()
Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...
![Submit Button Enabling]()
"Enabling" you ask? Yes. We all know how to disable the submit upon form submission and the reasons for doing so, but what about re-enabling the submit button after an allotted amount of time. After all, what if the user presses the "stop"...
![Create a Spinning, Zooming Effect with CSS3]()
In case you weren't aware, CSS animations are awesome. They're smooth, less taxing than JavaScript, and are the future of node animation within browsers. Dojo's mobile solution, dojox.mobile, uses CSS animations instead of JavaScript to lighten the application's JavaScript footprint. One of my favorite effects...
> 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…