Does anyone else use Google Analytics (and Webmaster Tools) much? This'll probably mean nothing to you, if you don't, but it made me smirk:

Came up while I was looking for RSS > G+ tools (I know, I know; I haven't had time to sort it properly yet).

I assume that someone at Google forgot to use their own tools, but it's kind of odd they don't ignore the GA campaign parameters across the board by default.

Ah, analytics checks are always fun. Been a tad easier on GA since they introduced the realtime bit. I assume you know about the debugger for Chrome, if it is indeed GA you're using? Spent ages pissing about with things before I realised that existed.

The link on that search result is the standard G+ homepage, only with the GA tracking from the Chrome "app" icon included. Presumably, someone had picked up the link and posted it to a site somewhere. If they were doing things properly, that should never come up in search results, though; even if they don't strip those parameters automatically, Webmaster Tools has an option to tell Google what bits of your query strings to ignore.

Edit: What's even odder is that the full URI from the icon is https://plus.google.com/?utm_source=chrome_ntp_icon&utm_medium=chrome_app&utm_campaign=chrome so they're ignoring two of the parameters.

Edit 2: Ooh, looks like there's a GA debugger for Firefox, too. Looks way better, too.

As in making sure bookmarks and other external links get redirected to the right place? My sympathies if (like so often happens) nobody ever bothered speccing out the URL structures properly.

Related to analytics, have you heard about how Google's looking into replacing tracking cookies with some kind of "Advertising IDs"? Strikes me as one of those things that could be really good if implemented properly and widely adopted, but has pretty much zero chance of that happening.

Ah, I get you. Thankfully, I've yet to be on a live site long enough to have to do that. I'm kind of dreading it.

Unless they royally fuck it up, I don't see these Ad IDs being more effort for devs at our level, I'd imagine it should all be handled by the ad servers and configured by traffickers. What I can see is it being worse for users, making them manage identity permissions and so providing loads of boxes they're going to click "ok" on without understanding and so legally giving companies more rights than they actually want to.

No, it's pretty well made, tbh. Embedding videos using youtu.be links doesn't work, btw. For anyone that wants to see it:
I don't bother on my personal stuff, I think it's likely that I could get enough financial backing from various companies to overturn the law in court if they ever tried to do me for it. Not that they would, of course.

On stuff for clients, I do the small "just to let you know, we're using cookies" message with a close button at the bottom of the site. I figure that if companies with shit-loads of legal advice on tap reckon that's good enough, it should do anyone.

This is fun: http://nocookielaw.com/

Ah, so that's why. Have to admit I pretty much ignored everything to do with it when I realised how unenforceable it'd be.

Poking about on YouTube, I have just been amazed by the variety of sharing buttons they've got now:



I've never even heard of two of those things.

Oh, didn't know they'd updated it, thanks.

It's certainly a lot better than it used to be, but I think I still prefer AddThis.

Yeah, just dropping in a couple is easy enough, but it starts getting unwieldy after that. I keep meaning to start my own library for doing it, but then I keep meaning to start my own library for a lot of things.

I like to work more on functionality stuff than design, so haven't looked at things like Foundation for ages. Probably should, though; I seem to be getting more stuff where I have to design too and the only things I've currently got in my design toolkit are a CSS normaliser, an IE8 HTML5 shiv and a Twig function for doing responsive column classes.

If you're a half assed lazy son of a bitch like me.

Going back to RSS and social networks, I dunno if this suggestion to use IFTT gets you any closer to a solution?

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-auto-post-to-facebook-or-twitter-from-google-wi-1352124886

AJ wrote:

Is Sass a daemon? I don't know if I can run those on the cheap-ass hosting I use. Edit: Oh, it's a Ruby thing, I see. I really should learn some Ruby.

Had a busy afternoon. Yeah sass is ok for you as you've got a mac so no issues running it. Check out Hammer for Mac on the AppStore I use it now for all my initial front end dev. Makes first round of development much easier, though I have to say my first use of sass wasn't great as I am very anal about the layout of my CSS and I don't like how sass outputs the final CSS. I think my usage of it will mainly be for variables.

Here you go, Mod: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32/ you'll want diffutils, I think. There's probably easier things to use with GUIs and everything, but I'm sure you can Google just as well as me.

Boris, I mainly use Symfony at the moment, so would probably run Sass on the server, via Assetic. I'm not sure Hammer would offer me much in this environment, but it looks interesting so will check it out, thanks.

I hope this works, 'cause I'm totally going to be all "bow down to my superior search skills", if it is (literally got this from the first result on Google).

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/TortoiseMerge.html