Where I am now…
It’s been seven or so months, but I’m back to blogging about design, programming, technology and whatever else I think you might enjoy reading. But before I dive back in with regular posts, I wanted to let you all know where I am professionally and what I plan on doing with this site.
Professionally
From 9-5 I’m still working (and plan to keep working) at UNC Design Services. On the side I’m picking up more freelance clients and working on personal projects when I have free time.
If you’ve got a project and you think I’d be a good fit, don’t hesitate to contact me.
This site
I started my redesign blog with the idea of making this site “memorable and unique” and “flexible in terms of color and layout.” That’s still my mission, I’ve simply moved my writing to this unfinished space.
Flexibility is the biggest goal, because I want to be able to experiment with each page/post, a la Jason Santa Maria. My hope is that this will diminish the urge to redesign the entire site every few months. We’ll see…
Next steps
The first thing I plan on doing is creating a simple header bar that will remain consistent across the site, regardless of how the main content is styled. I don’t want visitors to feel lost when navigating from page to page.
After that, it’s back to sketching wireframes of the homepage with the content I’ve already planned out.
Feed troubles
Sorry about all the feed problems. I think I’ve wrangled Expression Engine and Feedburner to the point where everything works, but feel free to buzz me if something is still messed up.
Excluding subdirectories in Google Analytics
Currently, I use Google Analytics (gotta love the $0 price tag) to gather statistics on my web traffic. The default view shows you hits for your entire website including all subdirectories. Creating a view to see only a certain subdirectory (e.g., ”/blog/”) is simple. Create a new profile, edit that profile, and follow the Google’s directions for adding a filter to include only traffic to a subdirectory.
Excluding a directory from a profile isn’t explained, but I stumbled on to the solution on Google’s forums:
- Create a new filter
- Choose the filter type from the drop down box titled Custom filter
- Choose filter field titled Request URI
- Add a filter pattern like this ^/directory/ where the ‘directory’ is replaced with the directory you want to exclude
That’s it, but there are a few caveats. Filters permanently filter data. If you create a filter that excludes a certain directory, disabling that filter will not reveal past data about that directory. Filters are also only active starting from when you created them. So your data before that time will not be changed.
New blog
Welcome to my new blog.
I’m going to be moving my content from http://cjredesign.wordpress.com and adding features over the next few days. Also, I’d appreciate it if you’d take the time to subscribe to my RSS feed hosted by the kind people at Feedburner/Google.