Archive for October 11th, 2006

Octo11

Christian Decker

0

Tracking Ajax Pages with Google Analytics

I just read a post over at Ajaxian.com on how to use Google Analytics online, another to track Ajax Pages. Google Analytics is a really good tool for Web 1.0 fashioned pages but is terribly wrong for Web 2.0, first of all a pageview cannot be translated to anything in an Ajax Page. Is a refresh of a part of the page, let’s say the user list currentlypageview or is only the change of the main content a new pageview? Google Analytics themselfs suggest that you call the urchinTracker upon every successful XMLHttpRequest, but I believe that this is really dangerous. By triggering too many pageviews we first of all obscure the data we are actually interested in (how do you distinguish a single content reload among thousands of minor updates of some small widget?) and you significantly reduce the speed of your application by generating additional overhead. So my advise: although it might be tempting to use things like Prototype‘s Ajax.Responder to trigger the urchinTracker function, don’t! It generates a huge overhead and actually obscures your statistics.
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Octo11

Christian Decker

0

Google Documents & Spreadsheet

Do you remember that some months ago Google bought Writely? Well they completely reworked the site, which is no longer called Writely and the old domain redirect to docs.google.com and is now called Google Docs & Spreadsheet. On the layout side, nothing really new, they took the, now classic, GMail look and feel and put it on Docs & Spreadsheet too, discarding the whole Writely layout, which is a pity if you ask me because the Google stuff starts looking all the same. They now have integrated both Writely and the Spreadsheet application in one file manager

On the other side Docs & Spreadsheets has a far better toolbar, divided in 3 distinct parts, Edit, Insert and Revision, which helps the editors by hiding stuff that is rarely used, yet important, in other tabs in the toolbar and keeping the main toolbar as simple as possible.

You can save your documents both on the server and on your computer. Exporting your documents to your computer offers you a variety of Formats:
  • HTML: a zip file containing the formatted HTML file and the images used in your document.
  • RTF (*.rtf)
  • Word Document (*.doc)
  • OpenOffice (*.odt)
  • PDF
But Google’s approach to document management is “why download and save them, just let them here and keep track of them here”, and they made it really easy to do so: you can collaborate with other users on a single document, keep versions of them and publish the articles to your blog or an openly accessible URL on Google. Sadly you can post only to one blog at a time, as Google Documents & Spreadsheet does keep the settings only for one account, but still it is a neat feature.

After all Google Documents & Spreadsheet is a real step forward towards a pure online Office Suite that let’s you collaborate, edit your documents and gives you access to them from wherever you have a Browser. There are just too many features to list them all (Spellchecking, Upload of Documents, …). The speed of the application (one of my criticisms at writely) is pleasantly fast and I just can’t find anything that really disturbs me :)

Give it a try ^^
Technorati Tags: ajax,Google Documents & Spreadsheet,Google
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