You may be wondering what can be common between web analytics annotation and application release. Before I answer that, it will be nice to understand what is annotation with respect to web analytics. Annotations or Notes Using annotations user can add shared or private notes right on the web analytics graphs. Annotations are quite useful to explain the unusual spikes or behaviour in your web analytics graphs.

Recently I wrote about a standard data layer for customer experience data. Extending our last discussion, in this post I am going to describe how you can use custom data attributes (data-*) and data layer for event tracking. As an example and to demonstrate use of custom data attributes and data layer, we are going to use Google Analytics.

A very happy new year to all my readers. The excitement of making resolution in new year’s week is practically irresistible. So here I am. This post is for myself more than anyone else. 2013 It feels like only yesterday when I wrote a similar resolution post last year. What I can say? Time flies very quickly, often so quickly that there is not enough time to accomplish all resolutions. That was story of last year.

After much deliberation, recently W3C Customer Experience Digital Data Community Group released version 1.0 of Customer Experience Digital Data Layer (CEDDL). This specification is designed to communicate customer experience digital data to analytics and reporting services. What is a data layer? A data layer is a standard way to format data within a web page.

Recently I discussed at length about Responsive Images and Responsive Image as Service. In this post I will discuss how we can use some effective templating techniques to implement highly maintainable responsive image markup. Templates express presentation logic of a web application. Templates are quite similar to plain HTML markup but they are re-usable and modular.

A Responsive Image as Service (RIaS) offers on-the-fly responsive image generation and delivery using REST APIs or REST like image paths. RIaS is a key component of any responsive image solution. RIaS acts as image proxy. To generate responsive images it uses master images typically stored in an image repository. RIaS can be deployed as standalone service as well as embedded service.

A lot has been written about current state of responsive images. Things like why we need responsive images ^{1 2} , use-cases ³ , requirements ³ and how to choose a responsive image solution ^{4 5 6 7} are well documented elsewhere. This article is my attempt to distill signal from noise.

Typically my Vagrant workflow starts with a official base box provided by Ubuntu. With help of a Vagrant providervagrant up will create a virtual machine (VM) using specified base box.

There are key differences between deployment and release. Deployment means putting the latest stable version of code on your web application servers. Latest version of code often includes a range of features or improvements. Release means making all or selected features available to the public or end-users. In addition, one main difference between deployment and release is the ability to roll back.

In last 5 years or so, content management systems have evolved. New breed of content management systems (CMS) are powered by content repositories. Behind the scenes content repositories use familiar persistence managers such as relational databases, file systems, in-memory etc. That said, content repositories are more than just plain persistence storage.

When it comes to select a Content Delivery Networks (CDN) there are many factors you need to consider such as performance, availability, scalability, reliability, pricing model, features, SLA etc. In my opinion performance and pricing are key in the decision making process. Performance CDN performance is measured in terms of speed of DNS resolution and content delivery.