Technology At Its Best blog

Supporting A Mobile-First Strategy

joe.price — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 17:38:52 +0000

According to Google data, smartphones have reached mature adoption rates (above 50%) in 19 countries in 2013. This is up from 6 countries in 2012. From 2012 to 2013, smartphone penetration increased by an astounding 17.75 percentage points on average.

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is here to stay. Right now around 11 or 12% of the top 100,000 sites are responsive, and no doubt that number is slated to rise over the next few years.

(An) Optimal Drupal 7 Module Configuration for Site Performance

joe.price — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 17:21:18 +0000

The Drupal community is notorious for producing excellent modules to meet specific needs without much more than a cursory acknowledgement of the interrelationship of other / complementary modules. This is no more apparent that with performance modules.

Different sites definitely call for different configurations and combinations or performance modules but there is a standard set that should be applied to virtually every production Drupal 7 site.

Image Click Tracking with Google Analytics Events

joe.price — Wed, 15 May 2013 13:47:18 +0000

I recently wrote a short article about Tracking Form Submissions with Google Analytics Events that focused on one particular use case of event tracking. A client of mine wanted to begin tracking image clicks on their site and I thought I'd share what we did.

The question was, how many times is a particular linked image clicked? Google Analytics automatically tracks the page views on each end of the link, but it doesn't show if they got they there by clicking on a slideshow graphic or other promotional image you might be displaying.

Tracking Form Submissions with Google Analytics Events

joe.price — Thu, 02 May 2013 14:21:47 +0000

Google Analytics can be customized to track just about anything on your site.

Google Analytics Event Tracking is a method available in the ga.js tracking code that you can use to record user interaction with website elements, such as a Flash-driven menu system.

With ga.js, you would commonly apply Event Tracking to:

Responsive Google AdSense Ads

joe.price — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:38:11 +0000

In Drupal, the AdSense module provides a way to easily implement Google AdSense Managed Ads on your site. The problem is, the ad size is fixed in the module generated blocks. For a responsive site, this can be a real problem -- a 728x90 Leaderboard ad isn't going to display properly on a 320px smartphone. After testing a few other alternatives, a really flexible solution is a custom block.

In essence, the code checks at page load to see:

Custom Views 3 queries in Drupal 7

joe.price — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:03:33 +0000

Back in the Drupal 6 days, writing a custom Views query was as easy as $view->build_info['query']. However, because Views is now using Drupal's new query generator, the query is a SelectQuery object which you will have to modify or replace¹. Fortunately, there is some good documentation around dynamic queries to get you started.

Display Suite, Custom code field & PHP

joe.price — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:11:01 +0000

Recently, I needed to customize the standard 'Read more' link that Display Suite provides, based on the taxonomy term of the nodes. There are a few ways to do this but a Custom code field turned out to be a simple and effective solution.

In the following code, I output the term name as a class for the Read more link. If you need any entity info, use Display Suite Code (this allows the use of $entity - php code does not).

Carbon Neutral Hosting

joe.price — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:43:15 +0000

A "typical server" running 24 hours a day for a full year has a total energy usage of approximately 4,000 kWh or emits roughly 3 tons of CO2 per year, according to TrueCloud.¹ In relation, an acre of rainforest consumes around 4 tons of CO2 per year.

Hosting Providers

joe.price — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 02:15:08 +0000

Finding a good hosting provider is a bit of a journey. Over the years, my needs have changed and so too has my hosting provider. I started out using Bluehost on a basic shared server plan and it worked for what I needed -- a standard way to host one, or few, low priority sites.

Web Application Performance Management

joe.price — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 01:42:50 +0000

Day to day monitoring of site and server performance is critical to cultivating the user experience. Among performance management tools, New Relic is one of the finest. New Relic is one part analytics and one part performance monitoring, providing a complete picture of the day to day, site-level performance.

With the New Relic application performance monitoring solutions, customers can receive real-time insight of:

Technology At Its Best blog

Supporting A Mobile-First Strategy

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(An) Optimal Drupal 7 Module Configuration for Site Performance

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Image Click Tracking with Google Analytics Events

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Tracking Form Submissions with Google Analytics Events

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Responsive Google AdSense Ads

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Custom Views 3 queries in Drupal 7

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Display Suite, Custom code field & PHP

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Carbon Neutral Hosting

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Hosting Providers

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Web Application Performance Management

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