Yoast has a nice article with important details when settings WordPress on SSL. It details how to force SSL on specific pages, using Cache and CDN and fixing links in theme files.
Categories
WordPress and SSL
Month: December 2012
One thing that always bothered me about Google Analytics in-page click maps is that you can never tell where a customer clicked if you have several links that go to the same pages.
Now you can easily do it. Took me a couple of minutes to set it up, now I guess I'll have to wait and see if it behaves properly – usually results for these click maps were weird and really different from other services such as CrazyEgg…
Categories
Running a software business
Great article by Patrick McKenzie on Running a software business on 5 hours a week .
Some of the advice I found interesting:
- Time Assets: stuff that will save you time in the future. For example, code that you write today that will save you time later, or automating a process.
- Build less: everything you add will take time later.
- Look for people paying money to solve a problem semi-manually to find good software opportunities.
- Plan your business for long term – when you are working part-time things that change quickly are a poor match.
- If you have a day job, one way to get your employer to sign a contract saying that your work is your own is reminding them that you will learn stuff (languages, technologies, etc) that can be used on your regular work without any expense for them.
- ”The only acceptable response to a feature request is: ‘Thank you for your feedback. I will take it under advisement and consider it for inclusion in a later version of the software.’” I have been using a somewhat similar response (your request was added to the to-do list or something) but I only say that when I mean to eventually do it.
- Document everything
- Avoid events, plan for processes.
I just started using Definition – a WooThemes theme which looks nicer than my current theme (Inspire, also by WooThemes). Not only that, but it uses Responsive design, so it looks great on tablets and smartphones.
Currently it is only on Disk Usage, one of my microsites, but I intend to use it on this blog (and possibly my main site) soon.
There are two things I really like about WooThemes:
- Their themes are solid (every one of the PAID themes I tried had some major problem or another, sometimes several).
- Their themes have plenty of options, so it is unusual that you have to go down to editing theme files – which easily happened with other themes I have used. Check out the screenshot and note the side tabs – and most of these have more than one item!
Definition has not disappointed in these aspects, expect for a couple of minor things (a blue bar on the side of the title and Comment buttons when comments are disabled). I have contacted their support, let's see how they respond.
Update: a few hours after my support request they answered both my questions. I had an empty page that for some reason didn't show up on the other theme (so I just added a menu without it), and they sent the CSS to remove the button and divider:
.comments.button {
display: none;
}
.home .post-more-sep {
display: none;
}
Categories
Inspectlet review
Inspectlet is a web service that provides heatmaps, real time analytics, and their main selling point, videos of your users in action.
They have a very reasonable free plan – 2500 pageviews, 500 captures for a website. These seem to be split on a daily basis, however. If your site has a reasonably average daily use pattern this might not make a difference.
One nice thing about the free plan is that it covers your whole site. I have used the free Crazyegg plan for a while, and it only collects data for a page at a time.
On my personal trial, it seemed to count 17 videos for the day, but I could only see 7 in their list.
I have used the standard method to add the monitoring to my site – just a few lines of javascript added to the footer. The script is reasonably sized and loads fast.
Videos
Most of my site capture videos are very short – a few seconds. Maybe due to the nature of my site, I found very little useful information viewing them, but it is kind of interesting.
From my limited sampling, their captures seem to be very buggy. I have seen a 375×74 capture in which the user still interacted normally, and I have just seen a video where the user clicks a button and the video displays the wrong page loading (the user then proceeds to click where a button is on another page, and ends in the proper page).
Heatmaps
The eye-tracking heatmap show a visual map that uses the mouse cursor as a substitute for the user eyes. I'm not sure if this makes any sense, but they say there is research that support this. It does seem to match the expected area for my pages.
The click heatmap is just the classical map. Given how poorly it matches the actual clickable areas in the page, it seems like the display is somehow misaligned.
The scroll heatmap uses colors to show how far the users are scrolling down the page.
All heatmaps can be filtered by date (start only).
The heatmap list could really use the number of visits. Otherwise, we just know if a particular page had enough visits to make the information useful by entering each heatmap. For a large site with infrequently visited pages, I imagine this would get pretty bad.
Analytics
I have no idea how these are, as it is not included in the free plan.
Conclusion
Inspectlet still seems a little buggy, but if you ignore that, you get a lot of information on the free plan. The other plans seem to be on par to similar services. I e-mailed support once and they did answer pretty fast.
Overall, I'm still looking. It is interesting to note that Google Analytics now has a simple heatmap system, but it only use links clicked, not actual clicks (if you have several identical links on the page, they all display the same percent of clicks). It also ignores download links and anything that leaves your site. It is completely free for now, though – just go to your site in GA, Content Tab, In-page analytics.