Serguei Alleko Blog

Frist time sinds I sold my old private PC to my friends in the student campus in 1999 I’ve bought one! The last 10 years I got only PCs from work.

10 years ago I was able to find the best configuration, based on 486MMX processor for me, but now I was not sure. So, I’ve asked some friends to make one for me.

The result was:

2 30 gig’s drives in RAID0 become a system disk and 1 terabyte drive is for the data

For about 900 euro (without VAT) I’ve got a nice, fast and black box!

We got it. I’m not 100% sure how, looks like order of functions is important for Google. Strange, it should not matter at all.

Anyway, in order to receive the transaction data correctly, google scripts must be invoced in the following order:

1. pageTracker._setDomainName(“.company.com”);         
   
2. pageTracker._trackPageview();
   
3. (all _addTrans and _addItem calls)
4. pageTracker._trackTrans(); 

Transaction must be tracked after the page. After some hours we starting to get the transaction data!

Still we can not manager to install right codes to track Google transactions.

I’ve already described a number of steps we’ve made here

Sins then we’ve tried to change from one tag <script> into two and some other minor (seemingly useless) changes.

At some point we’ve seed a flash of light at the end of the tunnel, Google has registered 5 transactions (like much less that 1% of what is there) and than again – nothing.

The most frustrating is absence of error log.

I wonder what is it exactly we’re doing wrong.

Following advice from Jeremy Schoemaker about what to write in a blog, I’ve decided to make it a bit less serious. I gues I was trying to write a book, not a blog. Ok, personal stuff.

Tree years ago I discovered audio books. I didn’t get the idea first, how could anyone sit on their sofa for hours and listed to a narrative. The information flow is too weak for me, I got bored and want something more active, like browsing Internet. Audio Books are normally slower than normal books. If you’re listening to a fiction novel and have a final pinnacle of confrontation between good and evil, a moment of maximum pressure, this moment can last 40-50 minutes on a audio book, it’s a bit too much.

But then I found you can listen to it in the car! It’s perfect, I spend more than 6 hours per week in the car, mostly on highways. Nothing really happens on highways, so I can spend part of my attention to a book.

At first, I’ve listened to the whole Discworld series by Terry Pratchett, then some other fiction books. Then a friend of my pointed into The Teaching Company. This company produces lectures on history, sociology, psychology, culture, almost everything. The lectures are read by the professors really fans of their own subjects and very interesting to listed too.

But it’s hard only to learn, sometimes fiction literature (sci-fi, history or classic) is a nice change. I’ve got all 5 famous books by Feodor Dostoevsky and enjoying his famous quality of characters. I’ve added a plug-in for Wordpress showing which  book  I’m currently listening to.

One of the best thing I love about email – it’s predictability of delivery.

You always (well, almost almost always) know if your email was delivered or not. Either your email shows up in the mailbox of the recipient or warning shows up in your mailbox. Nothing disappears in the middle. It could well be one of the most important  reasons of popularity of email communications at the dawn of Internet.

That was before Anti-Spam was invented. Anti-Spam programs or gateways can and often  do delete emails without any trace. In the last years I think 90% of the time my emails were not received was due to a spam filter.

Anti-Spam takes form the emails it’s predictability.

Well, fortunately now there are other, even more predictable electronic means of communication, like instant messaging.

Already 3rd day we can not manage to force Google Analytics to count our e-commerce transactions.

The goal was to count number of products, sold in our e-shop and number of downloads there. Google just shows 0.

Specialist from Google Adwords Company thinking that the reason is a wrong domain name.

First it appears we forgot the dot before domain name

pageTracker._setDomainName(“.company.com”); //it was just company.com without first dot. Google can not track those cookies from different 3rd-level domains, if you don’t do it correct

Then it looks like we set up the setDomainName after _trackPageview:

pageTracker._addTrans(
// info about product sold. If this is called before setDomainName, it doesn’t count
pageTracker._setDomainName(“.company.com”);  

Still doesn’t work. The latest idea was, that on some pages we forgot to be case-sensitve

pageTracker._setDomainname(“.company.com”);  //must be Name with capital N

Let’s see if this one works!