I’m clapping my hands and lickin’ my chops!

First though, you should read the following entries as they provided most of the information I am sharing.  You’ll have a much better understanding what’s going on in the code, and about GA in general:

- server-side and client-side web analytics
- unobtrusive click assignments for Google Analytics
- Google Analytics without javascript

Now the code: this PHP snippet will generate the URL with the values you specify, and make the call to GA.  There are a few parameters I’m not 100% certain about, but it shouldn’t break your stats as is.  You will of course need to replace a few variables – such as the Google Analytics account number, the referrer URL, the title of the page you want to track, etc.

I make no claims about my coding style :) – just trying to help anyone who had similar issues about tracking widgets that I had

Enjoy!

Update: Two caveats I forgot to note regarding how this method will affect your GA stats.  cURL identifies itself as “gzip” when making a page request (in this case, when notifying GA) so you’ll see gzip as a common browser.  Also, the calls will be made from your hosting provider, which will skew the location statistics – i.e., if you have a service specifically for Japan but are hosting from a cheap provider in the US, you may notice a lot of visitors from the US …

Allan’s quest for #1 has inspired me to do the same.  How many people with a name like Matthew Romaine could there possibly be?  Turns out there’s at least one in Florida with a blogspot url.  A few years ago Googling for “Matthew Romaine” pulled up numerous articles about a Wyoming murder; now the top hit is to an archive of scientific papers because I co-wrote a SIGCHI paper during my days at Xerox PARC (now PARC, Inc.).  But this was 5 years ago – a century in Internet time.  Must. Produce. More.

Even the shortened “Matt Romaine” doesn’t put me at #1 – instead, the top link is to another project I worked on in grad school (and the second link is to my Friendster profile, which I haven’t updated in ages!).  I say, the weighting for these other sites is way too high; distinguishing these differences should be a trivial problem for the Goog.  I’ve got meta tags, the url, and my name peppered throughout this site.  How else to optimize?  Ooh, looks like matthewromaine.com is available!  Not anymore.

Should I redirect, or mirror?  How does Google handle redirects for rank weightings?

mromaine@gmail.com (bring it on, spam-bots :)

Today, though, the advantages of size are trumped by what are called “diseconomies” of scale: inertia, bureaucracy, risk aversion, clock-watching, office politics.

Google manages to find it (what was the term for getting a single hit in Google?). Now if I can just remember who sent me the article in the first place :)

Btw, it’s a good article that’s quite relevent to other sectors besides biotech. Read it if you’re suffering from bigcompanyitis.