Brian Cray: Measurement-driven, user-focused web entrepreneur & consultant

According to PostRank, “Over 80% of the engagement with your content doesn’t happen on your blog.” That’s a big deal on many levels. In the context of this post, it confirms that number of comments alone doesn’t constitute the popularity of your blog posts.

Lucky for us though, PostRank—a company that monitors and collects social engagement data in real-time across the web—provides powerful Data Services that give developers API access to that social engagement data.

Today I’ll show you how to use PHP5 to fetch and display your blog’s most popular posts using PostRank’s Top Posts API.

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In a default Google Analytics setup, the information you have about your users’ navigation behaviors and preferences is limited to which pages they viewed and where they came from. But what does that really tell you about how your users behave inside your web pages? Not much, and that’s where all the juicy behavioral insight comes from.

• Are your users using the main menu to navigate or do they use different means to find content?
• Do your users scroll through your content and click links in the footer?
• Do your users click on an article title or the “continue reading…” link?
• Do your users actually go through the items in my dropdown menu, or are they unaware of the dropdown menus?
• Do your users follow your related blog entry suggestions?

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A common design pattern—if you want to call it that—is to display a random header image or advertisment on each new pageview. I’m always looking for ways to simplify code [see 1, 2, 3], and naturally, I tried to do it here.

Today’s impossibly simple code turns the task of image randomization into a 1-line jQuery code snippet. Awesome.

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What happens to your Google Analytics if someone leaves the page before it has fully loaded? The page view doesn’t get recorded and Google Analytics fails as an accurate source of user data.

Google has fixed missing data issues with Asynchronous Tracking. Just read this quote straight from the Asynchronous Tracking documentation:

“Even if [a] button is clicked before the browser has finished loading ga.js, the event will be captured and eventually executed. Using traditional tracking, the browser might throw an exception in this situation.”

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linkNotify 2.0 is a jQuery plugin that provides better user feedback on clicked links than the browser by displaying a color-changeable progress bar behind the link.

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While building Nearby Tweets v2 I had trouble grabbing the proper city/state/country name out of Google Maps API’s Geocoding JSON object. The problem was that the JSON object is structured differently for different places across the world.

After multiple tweaks to pick the right information out of an unpredictable multidimensional structure, I finally decided to search the object for the keys I wanted and return their values. That way it wouldn’t matter if the structure changed. But alas, I couldn’t find a function that searches a multidimensional array or object for a string key and returns the value. So, I had to write my own.

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Wireframing in terms of website design means to create a basic “sketch” of your website’s user interface. While many web designers jump straight from client meeting to Adobe Photoshop, or even to creating CSS and HTML prototypes, they are missing important opportunities in the website design process. Wireframing addresses extremely important issues in strategic design, client adoption, and user-centered design.

The value of wireframing comes down to a simple idea: Wireframing forces you to think about your user interface design decisions in terms of user needs first, instead of in terms of what looks good.

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I’m a big fan of increasing efficiency and consistency from conceptual design to implementation. This OmniGraffle template has helped me quite a bit in that regard, and I decided to share it with others.

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This article focuses on providing new members with an effective join/signup process. Although some of these principles may seem obvious, I’ve gone through plenty of membership signup forms that still suck. So hence the post.

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Seen in many forms, such as “Back to top,” “Top of page,” or “Scroll to top,” these links provide a way for users to jump to the top of the page, back to navigation and other handy stuff.

This tutorial will help you build a scroll to top link, or whatever you call it, that appears when the user scrolls down, and disappears when users reach the top of the page using a combination of CSS and jQuery (a free javascript framework). You’ll need to download jQuery if you aren’t using it already.

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