Online behavior tracking

A cute little video about online advertisers watching your every move online. I kind of agree with them. It’s one thing to want to know how many people come to your site and from what region, etc. But it’s another to track what they click on, their mouse movements, if they passed gas while on your site, etc. Even though some of my clients have made me spend weeks adding tracking codes to sites, I still agree with this video with all my heart.

Stop, stop, just stop ;)


Make Your Own Custom jQuery Selector

A nice little article describing how to write your own custom jQuery selector.

Visit Source

jQuery Default / JavaScript Default Options

This blog is more for myself than any of you readers out there. Every so often I need to have an object of some kind or a function that has its own defaults. Here’s how to do it using jQuery:

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// function
function myFunc(options) {
    var defaults = {option1: 'val', option2: 'val2'};
    var settings = $.extend({}, defaults, options);
    // do something
}

// or, an object
var myObj = {
    init: function(options) {
        var defaults = {option1: 'val', option2: 'val2'};
        var settings = $.extend({}, defaults, options);
    }
};

Conclusion

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A new way to advertise: BMW – Flash Projection / Paper-Plane.fr

BMW tested out a new technology, after image, that can be used to help people remember (oh, and for advertising) things. They used after image to get their logo inside of peoples heads. Watch the video.

I’m against the uses; although, this technology could be used in movie theaters, concerts, etc. to embed ideas into peoples heads. Pretty neat and pretty scary. What do you think?


I do NOT cut corners, and neither should you!

In hopes of motivating myself, I read. Most of the books in my library are about motivation. One book, in particular, Dave’s Way.

On page 10 in the book, something stood out that I thought I would share with all of you. It has to do with quality service, and giving people what their money deserves.

… a magazine reporter asked me why Wendy’s hamburgers were square. I answered, off the top of my head, “At Wendy’s we don’t cut corners.” It dawned on me then that not cutting corners was a lesson I learned from…

Folks, readers, viewers – name your slang – I, Michael Barton, offer you services that will be of amazing quality, and I promise, I DO NOT cut corners.

I can be reached view comments, my contact form or by phone 801-787-3237.

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Cloud Servers & iptables

When working with Rackspace Cloud Servers you’re given a vanilla box with nothing on it. This is known to anyone with experience using Rackspace’s Cloud Servers.Which means, when you create a cloud server that hasn’t been spun from your default cloud image, you need to setup a few things. You need to install Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc. All of this depending on how you’re going to use your cloud server. In this article, I’ll be talking to Linux servers instead of Windows (for Windows, contact me).

One thing that many people forget to do is open up the firewall and then finally, save the firewall settings.

iptables

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How to be a good web developer

I recently added live chat to my site in hopes of helping my readers and picking up more business. Adding live chat is easy when you use a service. I’m using Olark. They offer different plans, depending on your budget; I’m using their free version.

When implementing the code, I had a few different, easy to implement, options:

  1. Copy and paste the code, as is, without change (most slackers do it this way).
  2. Put the code in a theme function with a descriptive function name using the wp_footer hook.
  3. Put the code in a plugin, existing or new, using the wp_footer hook.

I’m sure the quickest and easiest way would have been to use option #1. It’s easy to implement and it takes 2 seconds. Right? Well, here’s my problem with that approach. You have ugly, loose code in your theme. That right there should scare you away from that approach; however, your average developer will do it this way. It’s sad, really. What you need to understand is that being a good developer does not necessarily imply that you’re the fastest. Remember the story about the tortoise and the hare? This approach is horrible. Having un-organized code just laying around is bad. What happens when you need to make changes? What happens when you forget what the hell that code is? Forgive my cursing, sometimes I forget where I am.

The second approach is better; however, what happens down the line when you need to change the theme and you want to keep live chat on your site? You’d have to move the code over to the new theme.

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.htaccess Redirect non-www to www

One thing that I constantly have to do with sites is add, for SEO purposes, a redirect of non-www to www. The reason being, Google sees michaelbarton.name and www.michaelbarton.name as two different sites and I’d get penalized for having duplicate content should someone out there link to my site using one or the other.

The solution being, choose which one you want to have redirect – non-www to www or www to non-www. The choice is yours. It’s really just a personal preference for me to use www in front of my domain.

The Solution: non-www to www

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<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
# Redirect non-www to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
</ifmodule>

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