Rudi Shumpert : Code By Numbers

24Jan/102

Are you ready for a kickstand?

It was a momentous week in the Shumpert house. My son informed me that he was "ready for a kickstand", and I was thrilled! What he meant by this was that he was finally ready to have the training wheels removed from his bike. In truth, he has been ready for a few months now, but had made up his mind that it was time. So we went to the store and picked out a kickstand, brought it home and installed it. He got on his bike and with a little push, he was cruising around the cul-de-sac like a pro. I was very proud.

As I sat there watching him ride his bike, I started to think about what he said. That he was "ready for a kickstand", and how that expression is different than the one I have heard more often of "ready for the training wheels to come off".

Being ready for a kickstand is to embrace the next challenge, to face what is ahead of you, and is a powerful, confident stance. Being ready to have the training wheels removed is still a good thing, but it does not give the impression of charging ahead into the next challenge. It is more of an acknowledgment that you are ready to face current task or challenge on your own.

How often in our jobs or projects have we been ready to charge ahead to the next, more challenging stage? To ask the more difficult questions? To begin to tackle things that in the past you would not have done. This is especially meaningful to me as over the next few months I am setting out to do things that a year ago I could not have imagined. I will be presenting at two different ColdFusion users groups on the benefits of adding web analytics to ColdFusion based web sites, applications. And if all goes well, I'll be giving a short customer talk at the Omniture summit on how my company is using the Omniture API's. This is something I am truly looking forward to.

And yes, I'm ready for my kickstand! Are you?

-Rudi

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Tagged as: Ready for a kickstand 2 Comments

17Jan/103

Review: Yahoo Web Analytics Book

For Christmas this year, I was lucky enough to receive a few analytic related books. Thanks in part that I put little else on my Amazon wish list! One of the books was Yahoo! Web Analytics - Tracking, Reporting, and Analyzing for Data-Driven Insights by Dennis Mortensen.

I put this book on my list to learn more about the technical requirements of implementing and working with Yahoo! Web Analytics. I had the basic vanilla code on my blog, but had not attempted to do anything more with it. This book proved to be just the guidance I was looking for.

I was pleased with how the book jumped right into the details of implementation without having to wade through chapters of background information and useless history. The instructions to get the basic tracking in place were clear and concise and provided all the the technical details necessary.

From there the book goes into the basic and advanced tags that can be employed to track just about anything of interest on your web site. What I especially liked about the book with regards to the explanation of the tags were the real world examples of how to use the tags within your site's code base, and then how these tags related to the settings and reports within the Yahoo! Web Analytics gui itself.

The pace of the book does not slow down as it goes into demonstrating how to get the most out of your data with leveraging all the tools and settings available to you with the Yahoo! Web Analytics interface. I went through the book while sitting at my pc so I could try each example as I read through them and feel that this method is the best way to get the most out of this book.

I have read many, many technical books before and I would definitely place this book in the top tier of technical books, and would highly recommend it to anyone working with the Yahoo! Analytics tool . It will go along side the other books I've read and continue to refer to frequently. This is the first technical book that prompted me to go out and try some more of the advanced techniques right away, as I relied heavily on this book as I have been working on a Yahoo! Web Analytics plugin for Wordpress.

-Rudi

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Tagged as: Review, Yahoo! Web Analytics, YWA 3 Comments

11Jan/103

5 Rules for Waging War

The February 2010 issue of the American History magazine had a great article on "George Washington's Five Rules for Waging War With Honor". As is often the case these days I could not help but think about how these rules apply to analytics. Not to say that working in analytics is like fighting a war, but there are many "battles" that each of us face in our daily tasks.

Washington's Rules were:

Don't Assume You Are Welcome
Cultivate Your Local Support
Respect Local Religious Practices
Don't Abuse Prisoners
Withdraw if Your Objectives Are Unobtainable

Washington provided these rules along with some instructions to his officers on how they should conduct themselves in war and in conflict. If you examine the instructions, you can see how these rules can be applied to most projects or new ventures. Here is my take on how these rules can be applied to working with analytics in a corporation.

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Tagged as: American History, Best Practices, Measure, Web Analytics Continue reading

8Jan/100

RIA Podcast

This week I had the chance to sit in on the RIA Podcast with a great group of fellow ColdFusion junkies. It was a blast, even if it ran late into the evening and even the next day. The podcast is produced by John Mason from CodFusion fame, and is recorded after the monthly Atlanta ColdFusion group meeting.

This episode covered everything from the release of the Flex SDK 3.5 to the new Nexus phone to the recent AOL - Time Warner split.

So if you are a fan of RIA items with an strong slant towards ColdFusion, Flex and the likes you should check it out!

-Rudi

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Tagged as: AOL, Flex, Nexus, RIA Podcast No Comments

2Jan/104

Personal & Professional KPI’s

Over the past few weeks I have seen many blog posts and articles on key metrics and goals to set and track for various types of web sites, and there have been countless postings about what New Year's resolutions people are setting. If you think about it, the resolutions are really KPI's (Key Performance Indicators), that most folks set as part of a yearly tradition, but there is often no plan put into place or any real means to track progress or completion of these personal and professional KPI's. As the expression goes, "those that fail to plan, plan to fail".

James Dutton wrote a great article on his Insightr blog on creating a measurement plan, and I believe that most of the steps that he outlined can be taken and applied to your personal and professional goals as well.

His steps for creating a measurement plan are:

Stage 1: Set your objectives and parameters
Stage 2: Visualise your measurement scope
Stage 3: Identify metrics and dimensions (including external data)
Stage 4: Identify business and operational KPIs
Stage 5: Identify KPI analysis drilldowns
Stage 6: Map out your Data Sources
Stage 7: Propose processes for target and goal setting
Stage 8: Identify business owners and visualisation / sharing process
Stage 9: Distribute, gather feedback - then publish

The steps that are important for setting a personal & professional or individual measure plan is similar:

Step 1: Set your objectives
Step 2: Identify metrics and KPI's
Step 3: Map out your Data Sources
Step 4: Define targets
Step 5: Identify support resources
Step 6: Gather results & share

I have combined a few of the items from original list, but the core of the steps to developing a measurement plan is there. So now we have a list of the steps to create an individual measurement plan, but how do these steps translate into actionable items?