Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

Google Analytics : Real Time Overview

In the last few month, Google Analytics team haven’t been getting much sleep I guess. They release features upon features upon features. I usually don’t have the time to properly check every feature they do right when they do it, so I keep a browser tab with an announcement open until I get to play with it. Sometimes though, either I lose the tab or close it or lose interest or lose hope that I will ever get to it.

Somehow I managed to miss it completely or forget to play with the Real Time beta functionality of Google Analytics. Today I stumbled upon this feature in my reports and I have to say it’s absolutely awesome. If you can’t find it straight away, switch your Google Analytics interface to the new version, navigate to Home tab at the top, then choose Real Time (beta) in the menu on the left, and click on Overview. If you have any sort of traffic on your site at that moment, you’ll see a screen like this, which will update in real time.

During your regular hours, especially on the small sites, it would probably be too boring to watch. But it can save you a lot of time and pulled out hair during a traffic spike.

If I had a busy website and an office full of people, I’d probably put a big screen or a projection on a wall with full screen page of those stats. How cool would that be!

The important field

This xkcd comic strip nails one of the most frequent problems with modern web interfaces.  Web forms will ask you confirm and re-confirm anything and everything, but the actual important information that is easy to make a mistake with.  The rule of thumb here is, of course, only ask to confirm the password fields, because the data in them is not visible, so it does make sense to check that the user actually typed in what he thinks he typed in.  Asking to enter email address once again is stupid, because, email address is usually displayed in a visible field, because email address is a frequently used string, which most people type automatically, and because the user won’t bother with re-typing but will just copy-and-paste from a previous field.

 

 

 

 

Lessons learned from a social news website

Back in February 2009, Paul Graham shared the lessons he’d learned from a side project of his – social news website Hacker News.  I’ve read it back then, of course, but once again someone pointed out to me the value of that article and I went back.  It is a must read for any web developer or even anyone who  participates in online discussions, social networks, or just maintains a blog.  Here is my favorite section that explains bad comments.

There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity. There is a lot of overlap between the two—mean comments are disproportionately likely also to be dumb—but the strategies for dealing with them are different. Meanness is easier to control. You can have rules saying one shouldn’t be mean, and if you enforce them it seems possible to keep a lid on meanness.

Keeping a lid on stupidity is harder, perhaps because stupidity is not so easily distinguishable. Mean people are more likely to know they’re being mean than stupid people are to know they’re being stupid.

The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a good predictor. Probably the cause is human nature rather than anything specific to comment threads. Probably it’s simply that stupidity more often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones.

Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it’s hard to write a short comment that’s distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny. The most tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. [5] So one advantage of forbidding meanness is that it also cuts down on these.

Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don’t all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.

Maybe the solution is to add a delay before people can respond to a comment, and make the length of the delay inversely proportional to some prediction of its quality. Then dumb threads would grow slower.