Google Analytics

This is for Tate and anyone else out there wondering how they can learn a little more about who visits their blog. I'd like to suggest Google Analytics. GA is a free tool provided by Google that can not only tell you how many people are visiting your site, it can tell you where your visitors are from, if they found your site from another site or if they found you through a search engine (and if so what words they were searching on).

You can determine what posts are the most popular. You may find that most of you visitors find you from another blog that you didn't even know linked to you. You may find that you have a secret following of readers from Wisconsin or Switzerland. And for the other geeky people out there, it also gives you information like browser usage, OS and a ton of other stuff. It's all pretty interesting, and you'll probably find that you have a lot more people reading your blog than you thought. (Keep in mind that it won't give you the names of the people visiting your site or any other identifying information.)

Google has a comprehensive guide to setting everything up that covers everything, but I'm going to offer a reader's digest version here. Don't be intimidated, it's really quite simple and only takes a few minutes to set up.

1. The first step is to create a GA account. If you're using blogger for you blog, or if you already have a Google account for anything else like Gmail, you can use that user name and password to log in. Follow the instructions to set up your account.
   
2. Once everything's set up, from the main page in the "Settings" column, click "Edit". Then on the next page, click "Check Status" (it's towards the upper right hand corner of the page). On the next page you'll find a box with a bunch of code in it. It will look pretty scary, but don't worry about it, just select it all and copy it. This is your tracking code.
   
3. Pasting the code
   • Sign into you blogger account, and select the "Layout" tab.
   • On the next page, select "Edit HTML".
   • You may want to follow the instructions at the top of the page for backing up your template, because if you mess up the next few steps your blog may not display correctly.
   • In the box of code, scroll down to the very bottom. You're looking for the "body end tag", which is usually in the second to last line of code and looks like this: </body>
     
   • Place your cursor just to the left of the body end tag, and paste the tracking code you copied in step 2.
   • The last part of you code should now look something like this:
     
     <script type="text/javascript">
     var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
     document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
     </script>
     <script type="text/javascript">
     var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-0000000-1");
     pageTracker._trackPageview();
     </script></body>
     </html>
     
     
   • Hit "Preview" to make sure everything looks ok, then hit "Save Template"
4. Go back to your Google Analytics page, in the "Settings" column, click "Edit", then on the next page, click "Check Status" (just like in step 2). In the yellow box it should say
   

   Tracking Status:

   Receiving Data

5. At this point you're done, but you'll have to wait about 24 hours for results to start showing up. To view the reports, just sign into Google Analytics and click on "View Reports".

As a side note, if you ever change your template it will erase the tracking code, so you'll have to repeat steps 2-5 to get everything working again.

There are all sorts of other things you can do, like have it not count when you visit your blog (seriously, who cares if you blog was visited 20 times yesterday if 19 of them were you checking to see if anybody left any comments?), but that's another post. Good luck, and feel free to ask if you have any questions.

Flawed Logic

I found this while reading and found it very interesting.

Recently, a number of Catholic bishops have criticized Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, a Catholic, for his position on abortion. Biden has said, "I'm prepared as a matter of faith, to accept that life begins at conception," but, he said, "for me to impose that judgment on others is inappropriate in a pluralistic society."

Archbishop Donald Wuerl disagreed. "When life begins is not a matter of faith, but a matter of science," he said. "Defense of innocent human life is not an imposition of personal religious conviction but an act of justice."

I especially love the quote from Wuerl. I've always thought the same thing, but he puts it so eloquently. It brings up the interesting point that the Pro-Life position, although it often coincides with religious faith, is not necessarily arrived at through question of faith.

In regard to a fetus, the first question is: "Is this entity a human being?" This question is a scientific question, and even the most basic understanding of science tells us that at conception a new being is formed in the likeness of it's parents. So I don't simply believe that life begins at conception because my religion indicates that I should (and while that would be sufficient for me, it would not be sufficient for those who did not share my faith), I also understand that this is the case as has been demonstrated by scientific observation.

So if science answers yes to the first question, a second question needs to be posed: "How are we to handle this life?" This is not a question of science, but of morality. Although this may seem a little more difficult since there is not a universal accepted standard of morality, that fact has not stopped our society from making universal decisions about similar situations. Murder, rape, theft and many other actions have been deemed crimes by our society on the basis of morality, not faith (even though faith in many cases would answer the same).

So to say that abortion is only an isue of faith, and that "to impose that judgment on others is inappropriate in a pluralistic society" is as logically absurd as to say the same of murder, rape, theft or any other number of crimes. The fact that faith has an opinion on the matter should not prevent us from discussing the issue in the shared arenas of science and common morality.

The Bailout

Please contact your Senators & Representatives about the proposed $700 billion bailout. This is what I wrote:

This is in regards to the proposed $700 bailout plan being discussed right now. Please do not make the mistake of throwing billions of dollars of taxpayer money to the banking industry in a desperate hope that it will cause more good than harm. I am against any plan that uses taxpayer money, or puts us in to debt to relieve these financial institutions of the unmarketable securities. I am livid that this type of irresponsible action is even being considered.

I understand that standing back may seem to be to ignore the problem, but taking the course of action proposed by the President will have consequences that will haunt us far beyond those we are currently facing. I do not want to be forced to pay for the mistakes of those greedy individuals who should have known better.

I would be in support of government backed insurance of these securities as a tool to free up the lending market. I believe there are some Republicans in the House that have presented this as an option. I would also be in support of temporary modification of the Sarbanes-Oxley mark-to-market rules.

I have voted for you in the past because I believed you had the wisdom to handle situations like this in a responsible matter. I hope that I can vote for you again.

Reason of the week to use Firefox: FxIF

I know a lot of you dabble in photography, so I think you'll find this little tool very fun. Here's how it works: Say you come across a photograph you really like, and you'd like to know how they got the shot. What camera did they use? Is it a long exposure? What was the aperture setting? A lot of times that information is embedded in the picture as EXIF data. With the Firefox add-on FxIF, all you have to do is right-click on the image and select Properties and you get a little window like the one below.

To install FxIF, click here.
If you haven't installed Firefox yet you'll need to do that first: click here.

Elise's Date With Daddy

We got the idea of doing "Dates with Daddy" with our girls from Brad's parenting series. I haven't been the best at being consistent with these, but this past weekend Elise & I went on a date.

Ever since Labor Day when she saw the planes flying around with advertisements in tow, she's been asking to see "planes go fast". So we went to Lunken Airport. We couldn't find a great view there, so we headed up to Alms Park, which overlooks the airport.

Elise liked to wave at the planes and say hi to them. Apparently "Hi" in plane language is a high-pitched shriek.

In between yelling at planes, she enjoyed walking around, and I enjoyed taking pictures.

It was pretty, but not that pretty. (I made the sky a little bluer and the grass a little greener.)

After looking at planes we walked over to the park and she played on the playground.

After that we went to UDF for some ice cream, then headed home for a much-needed nap. I think Elise slept too.

Michigan: Part 4

OK, one more picture of Michigan. I hadn't really noticed this one until I was showing some pictures to Brad Spence, and he liked this one. It's pretty simple, and I guess it never really stood out against the other 400 or so pictures I took that week, but the more I look at it the more I like it. It's a 10 second exposure (with a tripod of course) taken after the sun had been down for a while, so it looked a lot darker to the naked eye than it looks here. The water was pretty calm anyway, but the long exposure makes it look even smoother.

ISO: 200
Exposure: 10.0 sec
Aperture: f/14.0
Focal Length: 18mm (35mm equivalent = 27mm)

The Firefox One Week Test Drive

If you're reading this, I'm going to jump to the conclusion that you use the internet. I also know that statistically, most of you (about 66% at the time of this writing) are using one version or another of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE for short). You're probably using IE because you simply are not aware that there's a browser out there that's faster, safer, more useful and just plain better. It's called Firefox.

Until a few weeks ago, my wife was an IE user, and despite my best arguments for her to use Firefox, she stuck with IE. Then one day (after getting rid of a virus that we had gotten while using IE) she said she would give Firefox a try for one week. Now I realized that this was probably just to get me to stop bugging her about it, but that was OK. I set up a profile for her, so she could have her own set of bookmarks and features, and the trial began. The first day or two was the break-in period, getting used to the different layout and features. By the third or fourth day she announced that she was starting to like it better. A week or so later, and she is a convert.

"So what about me?" you ask. "I don't have a nerdy husband bugging me about what browser I use, so why should I switch?" [sorry about that; I've been reading Lou Priolo] That's a great question, but there are so many great answers that I can't fit them all in here. So I''ll be doing as series of posts highlighting the advantages of Firefox over IE. If at any time you want to give Firefox a try, just go to firefox.com.

Follow Me

Google is always introducing new things, and they're usually pretty good. Recently they came out with this thing called Following for blogs. It lets people keep up do date with your blog, and lets you know who's interested in your blog. So if you really love me, you'll click the Follow this blog link to the right.

Michigan: Part 3

While on the lake I had some fun with fire and long exposures.

We built a fire on the beach one night.

When you throw balsam branches on the fire, you get a lot of sparks.

Here's a shot of those sparks flying through the air.
1.6 second exposure

More flying sparks. Click on the picture to get a closer look and you can see large "ribbons" of light from some larger pieces of ash that flew from the fire.
1 second exposure

My brother waving a burning branch in the air. (don't blame him, I told him to do it)
5 second esposure

This is a shot of the dock illuminated by the fire. I used a tripod and did a 10 second exposure. I used automatic ISO so it was taken at ISO-560. I should have manually set it to 200 (the lowest setting on the D40) which would have resulted in less noise in the image.

Picture of the sky. Click on it to see the large version, and you'll be able to see the stars.
30 second exposure