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!
![Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS]()
Introduction
For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular.
In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...
![Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us]()
Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...
![Skype-Style Buttons Using MooTools]()
A few weeks back, jQuery expert Janko Jovanovic dropped a sweet tutorial showing you how to create a Skype-like button using jQuery. I was impressed by Janko's article so I decided to port the effect to MooTools.
The XHTML
This is the exact code provided by...
![PHP IMDB Scraper]()
It's been quite a while since I've written a PHP grabber and the itch finally got to me. This time the victim is the International Movie Database, otherwise known as IMDB. IMDB has info on every movie ever made (or so it seems). Their...
> 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…