Posted by Robert Merrill on October 8, 2009 under Tech Tips | 
Yesterday (6 October 2009), Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist, spoke at the Promega Biotechnology Center.
She’s an engaging and thought-provoking speaker. Though some of her factoids seemed to be just plain made up, she did say some things that ring true about how to use the various social media that I thought might be useful to others. So here’s Penelope’s advice, enhanced (I hope) with my own experiences.
Facebook is for keeping track of friends and family as they scatter. Read more of this article »
Posted by Robert Merrill on June 30, 2009 under Tech Tips |
I use Google Analytics. I don’t get a lot of traffic, so I like to exclude my own visits to my site from the reports. I use the Google Analyticator plug-in. Its Settings allow you to exclude traffic from the wp-admin pages, and also exclude all traffic from anyone logged in as an Administrator.
But I don’t routinely blog and moderate as an Administrator; I use an account with Editor privileges (my security sensibilities showing through I guess). Before moving to WordPress, I had a special page that set a cookie, and a Google Analytics filter to ignore that traffic. I didn’t want to keep using that mechanism, because I don’t like to spread responsibilities around in software if I can help it. Analyticator looks like it wants to handle traffic filtering, so I don’t want to fight it.
Fortunately, as an Administrator you can manage the Settings for each Plug-In. Analyticator’s has a form field that lets you set the “user level” at which Analyticator disables Google Analytics. The default cutoff level is 8, and it also tells you that as an Administrator, you are a 10. This wasn’t as helpful as it first seemed, because as an Editor, I couldn’t see the Analyticator Settings to see my current level, so I couldn’t determine the new cut-off value to set.
But a quick look in the WordPress Codex taught me about Roles, Capabilities, and associated levels (levels being a legacy mechanism).
So, to exclude yourself (and everyone else in a given WordPress role) from your Google Analytics, log in as an Administrator and,
| To Exclude Traffic from |
Set Analyticator Cutoff Level To |
| Administrator |
8 or more |
| Editor and above |
3 or more |
| Author and above |
2 or more |
| Contributor and above |
1 or more |
Save your settings and log out. Then log in as your usual blogger/moderator user and tell WordPress to remember you.
Your visits to your own site will no longer inflate your Google Analytics reports.
If you delete all your cookies, you’ll need to log back in as your blogger/moderator user or Analyticator will think you’re an anonymous guest and log your traffic again.
