On a recent project we were having server performance issues when the load was high. The server usually performed well, but occasionally the server did not respond as fast as we wanted. Locating the culprit was hard since it was fairly sporadic.

To try and locate the issue we added event tracking using Google analytics to every remoting call. One just before the call, one just after the call completed as well as tracking any errors that might occur. The event tracking at the end of the remoting call included the time the remoting call had taken in milliseconds. Voila! A few hours later and Google Analytics located the bugger for us. Google’s event tracking displays the average time for the call to complete. One of the calls took a lot longer than all the others and was quickly blamed.

ExternalInterface.call("pageTracker._trackEvent", "Remoting", "remotingCallName", "complete", time);

Google Analytics is the dog’s bollocks!

Google has a fine user interface for adding pointers to their map in their service “My maps”. But how do you load this into your website?
read more »

Google just added external resource loading to our Flash indexing capabilities. This means that when a SWF file loads content from some other file—whether it’s text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc.—we can index this external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.

Read more at the Official Google Webmaster Central

At yesterday’s Google I/O developer conference keynote, the powers that be declared their love for HTML 5 and all things “open web” (ie. not Flash, because it’s bad, real bad). Here’s a look [edit: Hugo gave me this link. Apologies if I mislead anyone into thinking that I could find something so amazing on my own] at what YouTube will look like in a flash-less future (Safari beta 4 or Google Chrome required, naturally).

Google has just released the public beta of their API. Javascript and Java libraries are already available, and support for other languages are in development. This certainly opens up for tailor made statistics solutions for clients, project managers and consultants.

More information @ TechCrunch

We have recently had some discussions on the future of Flash. I did some googleing today and this is what I found:

“We think JavaScript is awesome. We also think browsers are awesome. Indeed, when we talk about them, we say they are the cat’s meow – which is an American expression meaning AWESOME.”

- Google

After looking at some of the examples here I think Adobe might have a slight problem in the near future and that us flashers are going to have to diversify sooner than later.  Meow.