The Zoo

Tracking iPhone apps using YWA

Jon Espen Nergård — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:11:42 +0000

If you use Yahoo! Web Analytics as your primary tracking tool on your website and got an iPhone app the best thing is to get the trackingdata from the app into your YWA account. There is a easy way to do this using the image url from the trackingcode, but keep in mind that the app need to be connected to the internet in order to send the trackingdata to YWA.

Michiel van Gaalen @ SallyKnows has written a simple manual on how to track conversions in an iPhone app using YWA. If you would like more detailed statistics about your users and the usage of the app I would recommend using Flurry together with the YWA tracking.

Develop apps for Windows Phone 7

Jon Espen Nergård — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:44:50 +0000

Apple does it and Google does it. And now finally Microsoft is doing it. There is no doubt that 3-party applications for mobilephones is here to stay and is big business. It will be interesting to see how fast popular iPhone apps will be found in the Windows Marketplace and if it really can give Microsoft and their mobile platform a new boost.

The application platform is Silverlight, so if you have .NET skills you would be able to make some cool and usefull applications for Windows Phone 7. Learn more about developing applications for Windows Phone 7 and download the free developer tools here.

Gowalla – The next big thing or not?

Jon Espen Nergård — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:46:39 +0000

I’ve been doing some “hardcore” testing of the Gowalla service today. And i have to say that i am pretty amazed.

Gowalla provides a new way to explore your neighborhood and the world, share your travels with your friends, and collect souvenirs that reflect your personal path. -Gowalla Inc.

The Gowalla service uses the GPS on your mobile to find out where you are in the world and gives you the opportunity to share this with your friends on Facebook or Twitter. Or if you discover a new spot you may simply add it to the service. Another great and usefull part of Gowalla is the “Nearby spots” service, which will find any coffeeshop, museum or whatever spots users have added within a couple of hundred meters from your standing.

I’ve allready started to love Gowalla and it’s easy interface, but I’m not sure this is going to be “the-biggest-trendiest-internet-thing” in 2010. For that it’s to dependent of other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and the best part of the service is only available on a mobile with GPS. And the last point here reduces the potential user reach dramaticly since far from every mobilephone sold has GPS.

Another thing that I noticed when testing Gowalla is that I don’t see any clear business model? How are they going to make money to survive? Are they yet another social media service without any clear plan for how they are going to make money? But I see some really valuable data in Gowalla; Travelling and movement data of thousands of users.

Track your Wordpress blog with YWA

Jon Espen Nergård — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 12:40:26 +0000

Would you like having advanced real-time tracking of your Wordpress blog? With the Yahoo! Web Analytics Wordpress Plugin made by Rudi Shumpert you will get exactly that without having to know any coding. All you need is an Yahoo! Web Analytics account and a blog running on the Wordpress engine.

It only takes about 3 minutes to install and setup the plugin, and it does’nt require any coding skills at all. You get full overview over your visitors and whats going on on your blog, you even get to see if the users are logged in or not, and everything is real-time. However you will need to go thru a YWA consultant (such as Astrups.com that I work for) to get an Yahoo! Web Analytics account.

Wordpress for iphone

Jon Espen Nergård — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 10:23:19 +0000

Yesterday when I was setting up this blog i discovered that there was an wordpress app for iPhone. So today I wanted to test to see if this was something i wanted to use.

I started with some connection problems when setting up the app, not sure why since everything seemed to be ok. After a couple of tryouts I got it to work, and I love it! It’s easy to use, let’s me keep an eye on my blog and incoming comments. And the most important, I can publish something immediatly.

The Wordpress for iPhone app is also free, and I would actually been willing to pay for it.

For more information, visit Wordpress for iPhone.

Tracking Flash ActionScript3 with YWA

Jon Espen Nergård — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:52:27 +0000

At Astrups.com we use Yahoo! Web Analytics as our main tracking tool, and lately we have come across some problems using the trackingcode given in the YWA documentation for tracking inside flash objects. The problem was that the code in the documentation was designed for ActionScript2. Thanks to Fred @ Eyego we got to solve this issue using this codes:

At the top of the ActionScript you need to put this code(In a as class it have to be inside the classdefinition, if it is a timeline script it will need to be on the top of every script that uses the tracking, it is not enough to just put it on the root):

import  flash.external.ExternalInterface;

If the page is using the YWA v5 tracking codes you may now add this code inside the ActionScript to track elements:

ExternalInterface.call("YWATracker.page(\"PageTitle\",\"DocumentGroup\",\"Member  ID\",\"Action\",\"Amount\")");

Or if the page still is using the YWA v4 code you will need to use this code:

ExternalInterface.call("__IT.page(\"PageTitle\",\"DocumentGroup\",\"Member ID\",\"Action\",\"Amount\")");

Welcome to my blog!

Jon Espen Nergård — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:49:46 +0000

Hello! Dear visitor!

Welcome to my blog dedicated to technology and life in general.

If you are a bit confused by the name i chose for this blog, I can only tell you that it is a very long story, and since the domain name (Dyrehagen.org) is in norwegian and i wanted to write in english I just direct translateded it. I own enough domains for now.

I hope that you in the future will learn to appriciate my blog, I certainly will do my best to make this blog worth reading.