Stefan Hayden

If you are using Google Analytics you might see your own site listed as a referrer. Most commonly this is the case of having the same tracking code across multiple domains.

In the past this problem was mind numbing difficult to solve. Luckily Google has made this dead easy to fix with it’s new Universal Analytics. Sadly if you have an old Analytics account you can not convert it, but do not worry you can still keep that old tracking code on your site and track to both places.

Once you have set up your new Universal Analytics account you can follow the development guide to get it integrated on your site. Universal Analytics has a ton of new features and is well worth the time to set up.

The Fix:

In your universal Account go to the admin section. Find the “Tracking info” section. In that section there should be a option called “Referral Exclusion List”. Here you may list ANY url that you do not wanted to be listed as a referrer. And that is all it takes.

This does not fix old data and will simply stop this problem from happening in the future. Also the fix is not instantaneous. Each day the number of referals from the url you just added to the ”Referral Exclusion List” will show fewer and fewer visits. In my experience it could take one or two weeks for the problem to be totally fixed.

The biggest news from a youtube creator since annoying orange got it’s own tv show. Meghan Camarena of Strawburry17 and Joey formerly of WinterSpringPro and now his personal channel JoeyGraceffa are going to be on The Amazing Race. And what a great team they will be (or were as the show has already been filmed).

While exciting news for the youtube community who hunger for broader recognition and validation no one is surprised that these two have made such a deal. Both Meghan and Joey are growing stars with a lot of energy and know for their hustle and hard work to make ends meet on youtube Increasingly with low CPM ad impressions and views harder to get as youtube redesigns for bigger partners burgeoning stars have to find more and more way to bring in extra money.

What might have attracted The Amazing Race to these two untested stars?

First Joey and Meghan have almost half a million subscribers combined. Of those Meghan gets on average 20-30k views and Joey between 60-100k view. Of those views I would guess they are in the 13-17 age range and mostly female. This demo, while hard to track on Nielsen, would be an attractive audience for the CBS show to bring in. While holding stead at about 10 million viewers The Amazing Race will need to continue to find new audiences to keep their numbers up on a network where many shows are doing well.

Second Joey and Meghan are naturals in front of the camera practicing talking to a camera for years. Few people get this training and few contests have a proven body of work to demonstrate how they will be on the show.

The benefit is not all on Amazing Race’s side though. Look for Meghan and Joey to take full advantage of being in front of 10 million viewers weekly. I expect to see some interesting weekly online content and live interaction as the show airs building new viewership for their channels as well as the show’s.

Backstretch is a pretty great slideshow library both because of it’s features as well as the small amount of code it is all done in. But when implementing a code light library you will always run in to the problem of needing the library to do things that it does not have features for. And for that reason I’m going to highlight some of the features I built in to my own fork of Backstretch, all of wich are also documented on github.

Options:

Pause: By default the slideshow just starts to play but for us we wanted to start out with it just sitting on one slide.

lazyload: By default all of the images you pass in are loaded. This is not great for page speed and so this option only loads image when the slideshow goes to show the image or specifically requested though a call.

start: The array of images you pass in will always be shown in that order. But if you pass in an index then the slideshow will start at that point.

default_height & default_width: These are actually in the original library but were undocumented. This just speeds up getting the slideshow to draw it self correctly if you know the height and width in advance.

API:

cacheNext() & cachePrev(): With lazyload turned on the next image will not start to load until that slide is requested. With this call you can choose when is best to preload that next or previous image. I always keep the next image in the slideshow cashed and ready to show.

You can find all these features on my own fork of Backstetch where I will also attempt to keep it up to date with the main repo.

Ever wonder what format your JPG was saved in? Well wonder no more. Just open the JPG up in any text editor and do a search for the hex code ffda.

1. 0 results: this image will load all at once when it is done loading
2. 1 result: this image will slowly load from top to bottom in full resolution. this is called baseline.
3. 2 or more results: this image will draw multiple passes of the image in better and better resolution. this is called progressive.

As blastmedia has discovered Youtube is experimenting with the google plus button in place of thumbs up and thumbs down. Currently it doesn’t tie in with the rating system that google has in place and so for people who see the Google Plus button they are bard from giving a thumbs up without using the google api or switching browsers.

I can’t say I’m a fan. Like and Dislikes used to not be public let alone show in organic search results. If this feature is adopted every +1 has the potential to apear in search results. Ug.

Youtube originally did 5 stars but most people just voted 1 or 5 stars. So we got thumbs up or down. Now with Plus we loose anyway of providing negative feedback.

There are many reasons to no have negative feed back. All of them have to do with one group of users mas down voting content either for their own advantage or to discourage other groups of visitors. Youtube does not have this issue. There is no way to mass effect video ranking on youtube by disliking a video outside of botting. Wich to be fair @thewillofdc points out that Google has been lax in fighting botting as of late.

Some will say that letting people do a negative action on a site is never good and I would strongly disagree with them. Currently the down vote remains one of the more civil way on youtube to voice that you did not like a video. A great example of a valid use case is the Rick Perry Strong video which has a near 99% dislikes and for good reasons.

Negative comments remain much more damaging then down votes. Youtube is known, for good reason, as some of the most vile comments on the web. I can only imagine that letting people voice their dislike with a simple action stop even more horrible comments.

Please youtube. Add Google Plus as an option to the page. But leave the current ratings system in place. Both can coexist and content producers will definitely encourage users to +1 as it will clear help in google ranking.