Tag: Google

Google opens Knols – wiki on ads?

Google opened the doors for the public to the beta Knols. While Knols are very similar to Wikis there are two main overall design differences between the two. First of all while Wikis are “community authored” with a group of people behind most articles the Knols are author dependant. Whoever posts a Knol first becomes the author and moderator of the article. Secondly Knols have a direct interface to Google AdSense making it easy for the author to include ads in the articles, something few community based wikis allow (at least not to the benefit of the authors).

When writing Knols you have several options for each Knol you write (and by the way, Google defines “Knol” as a unit of Knowledge).

As an author you can choose to inlcude other authors or have an open (or moderated) author system much like the Wikis.

The information published in a Knol can be published under three different licenses that the author may choose from; “CC Attribution 3.0”, “CC Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0” and finally “All rights reserved”.

While I do not believe the wikis are in danger (and specifically the Wikipedia) the Knol does open up much more towards companies who might up until now found it pointless to give their information away for free. Being able to publish copyrighted material without losing control over it and at the same time gaining from AdSense published on those pages might interest some.

Small update on Google Analytics

I’ve used the code from my previous post on almost all my sites now a couple of days and all the statistics are still working and I no longer experience any slow loading times using Firefox with NoScript. Until I see either a change in Googles code (that they use a single domain for javascripts) or a new version of NoScript (that makes an exception for Google-related domains if you allow google-analytics.com) I will keep this code as it greatly improves the performance of my website.

Slow loading with Google Analytics

I experienced my pages slowing down when using Google Analytics togheter with my Firefox AddOn NoScript. Since I’m far from the only one using NoScript I found this not acceptable and worked out a possible work around.

The reason for the slow down is likely the timeout of the connection between my domain (where I’ve allowed scripts to run) and Googles domains (where I might or might not have allowed scripts).

Googles code look like this (where “UA-1111111-1” is your tracking ID):

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src='” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-1111111-1”);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

The first part of the code creates an obfuscated loading of the script located at google-analytics.com/ga.js. It picks a prefix of www if it’s a standard connection and ssl if it’s  an encrypted connection. The problem is that NoScript does not recognize this code and ends up in a deadlock of wether or not to allow the script to be run. My guess is that there is another script loaded from another domain called googlesyndication.com which fails to enter the NoScript-test and locks the loading of the page.

A possible fix that I’m still evaluating but which should do the trick is the following (code in bold added):

<script src=”http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-1111111-1”);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

As you can see I’ve made the obfoscated code clear text code and chosen the http://www-prefix (since I’m not using an encrypted connection for my server). Should you use encryption on your site simply switch http://www to https://ssl instead (this is what the javascript used to do). If you have a page which might be loaded encrypted or normally then you would have to include this choice earlier in a server side script for example.

After this fix Google Analytics works like a charm togheter with NoScript on any script-level setting for me.

Try this at your own risc, this is still experimental to me as well!