Warning: Sitting kills!

All these years as a non-smoker and I never thought I'd unwittingly spend every day of my life doing something almost as dangerous: sitting.

Unless you've been wandering the deserts of Arabia, or on a scientific expedition in Antarctica, in which case this news probably doesn't apply to you anyway, you can't have failed to have heard the latest research findings that warn that those of us with desk jobs have an increased risk of dying. Simply because we sit.

And it doesn't matter how seemingly healthy you are: what you eat, how much you weigh and how much exercise you do matters not a jot. If you sit for extended periods of time you are essentially killing yourself.

And apparently it's worse if you're a woman. (Well it would be, wouldn't it? As if we don't have enough to deal with.) Where men who sit for more than 6 hours a day have an 18% increased risk of dying of sedentary-related diseases, for women that number jumps to 37%! Hardly seems fair.

Perhaps it all relates to evolution. Men would expend a lot of energy hunting, then come home, eat a massive meal, fall asleep and then be essentially useless for a few days until another bison was required. Meanwhile, women were faffing about the cave, running around after small children, gathering leaves and berries, shooing away scavengers and generally being just a little bit busy, constantly. But that is mere speculation. An evolutionary biologist I am not. Although that would be a pretty cool profession.

Admittedly this news isn't really new. Studies on this topic have been conducted over the last few years and they all seem to corroborate the findings. But a recent study by the University of Queensland has some good news: you don't really need to do much to counteract this effect. Spending a minimum of 1 minute standing or walking for every 15 minutes of sitting is enough to keep you healthy.

Luckily for me, I am so full of baby at the moment that I can't comfortably sit still for any period of time anyway. But just in case I might start drinking water from an egg cup so that I'm forced to wander to the water cooler every 15 minutes.

References

1. MedConnect: Small Breaks From Sitting 'Good For Heart'
2. Inc.com: Action Tips for Healthy Employees
3. Daily Mail: Could Sitting Down Be the Death Of You? 
4. BuzzFeed: Sitting Down WILL Kill You (Infographic)
   

CAPS LOCK STUCK ON

This is a really annoying error that used to happen to me a lot but hasn't happened for ages. I thought I'd already blogged about it but clearly not. Anyway, today it happened again. I suspect this is the first time it happened on my work laptop, which runs Windows 7. So the blog I thought I'd written is probably just a note on my personal WinXP laptop.

I don't know what I did, obviously pressed some kind of sticky key combo, but no matter what I typed it came out as upper case. I could toggle my caps lock on and off and to all intents and purposes when it was off it looked off, that is the light went off. But I still typed in caps. I tried toggling the shift key, which should give me lower case when my caps lock is on. But that didn't work either.

The solution is astoundingly simple:

Start, All Programs, Accessories, Ease of Access (or Accessibility in WinXP), On-Screen Keyboard. Click the Caps Lock key on the on screen keyboard.
Job done.

I'm sure I had a different solution for WinXP but this one worked for me today on Windows 7.

UPDATE: This did not fix the problem within Word. It seems I inadvertently hit Ctrl+F3 whilst trying to adjust the brightness on my screen. This key combo shifts the case between upper, lower and sentence. To resolve just toggle Ctrl+F3 until you get the case you want.

Why Google Analytics and Google Adwords have different conversion rates

So here I am in the midst of a new job learning a new industry with all of its jargon and definitions. Amongst the very important things I have been learning about are goals and conversions. A goal is something you want a visitor to your site to do, be it fill in a form, or make a purchase. A conversion occurs when the visitor completes that goal. Simple, right?

So how come both Google Analytics, which monitors traffic flow to and through your site, and Google Adwords, which directs traffic into your site, both have the concept of conversions and how do they relate to one another? More importantly, how come they're sometimes different?

Well, as the Javascript for Google Analytics is on every page of your website it knows exactly where a visitor is and has been. That much makes sense. How does Adwords know? You help it by setting up conversion tracking. This places a cookie on the user's machine when they click on an Adword. When they finally get to a conversion page the cookie is picked up and Adwords registers the conversion as attributable to the source ad. What Adwords doesn't know, however, is which goal has been converted; that information comes from Analytics. Meanwhile, Google Analytics, also registers that the conversion has been made by virtue of the fact that traffic from a particular source has reached a conversion page.

So, you'd think that the conversion rates would be the same, wouldn't you? Well, more than likely, they aren't. Once you've clicked on an Adword and obtained the cookie, it sits on your machine for 30 days. This allows you to go away and think about whether you really want to make the purchase. In an Adwords report, your click has been registered but it hasn't led to a conversion. A few days later you return to complete the transaction and a conversion is registered, with the start date of the cookie as the date of the conversion. Viewing an Adwords report for the same time period will now show a different conversion rate. However, Analytics will always give you the same information for a given time period and won't count a conversion until it is completed.

For example, if I click on an Adword in August, but fail to complete the transaction until September, an Adwords report for August will count the conversion but an Analytics report won't. But the figures should ultimately end up the same right? Well, no, because come September my Analytics report has counted the conversion started in August, but Adwords won't count it for that time period because it already counted it in August.

Basically there is constant flux between these two figures and they are very rarely exactly the same.

Blogging is about communicating, sharing and marketing

I have just finished reading quite an interesting blog post, all about asking the right questions. It talks about using focused, situation-specific questions to get to the crux of the matter, rather than the usual big picture questions we tend to ask. I won't go into any more detail on that. You can read the post yourself if you're interested.

What I wanted to talk about was a comment posted in response to the article. The author relates the point he's trying to make back to a web project that he is working on, providing a link to the website in question. The project was funded by Xerox, for whom the author and developer works. There is a passing comment (but no link) to Xerox in the post. At the very end of the article, as a sidenote, he references a book he is writing, a chapter of which is based upon the same concept. He provides a link allowing readers to be notified when the book is published. This all seems fairly reasonable to me but one of the commenters took exception to this, saying:

You completely lost my respect when you mentioned your website.

I’ve noticed a trend in the last 6 months to a year where smart people write really smart articles, which I really enjoy reading, then make a really dumb mistake by tying what they’ve been talking about into their website / business / startup. It just seems really f**king lazy to me. You basically invalidate everything you’ve said previously by throwing in an advertisement for your website toward the end of your article. You (and I mean blog writers in general, I don’t mean to attack you directly) lull the reader into a sense of trust with your excellently written article (and yours is a very excellently written article, make no mistake) then drop an advertisement casually into the story, hoping readers will go to your website based solely on the quality of your writing only it now has had the opposite effect.

As I was reading, I had decided that I was going to bookmark this story and share it with my good friend (yes, I only have one. So what?) when I was finished with it, except now I won’t be bookmarking it and I won’t be sharing it with anyone. I certainly won’t be visiting your website, that’s for sure. Instead, I write this comment, in the vain hope that you will make a blog post about it and tell other bloggers so that you (again, all blog writers) will stop advertising your damn websites in your blogs.

Again, thank you for the article. It was enlightening and interesting, and I wish I could’ve enjoyed it more.

Frankly, I'm not surprised this fella has only one good friend. What a rude sod. I'm not sure what sort of a world he lives in but I thought this was the point of blogging. Experts freely share information that they find interesting/useful etc. but in turn they are advertising either themselves or their business. If I'm going to read a blog post I want to know a little bit about the author. "What makes him such an expert? What does he do? Oh! He wrote Trailmeme. Well, what's that then? Let's click on this link. Well, would you look at that. That is cool." Or, "hey! I liked that. What else has he written? Oh he's writing a whole book. That could be worth a read."

Some of the best things I've found on the internet have been stumbled across in this way. The blogging community survives by sharing, commenting, linking and it's a bit naive to think that everyone else is like me, typing away for the sake of it without much thought or care as to who is reading it or why I'm doing it. (And frankly, I only started doing this in order to advertise my professional services and expertise sometime in the future, should it become necessary.) Providing links between blogs and sites, talking about our work and advertising products we love is what blogging is all about.

What I do take exception to, however, is underhand or blatent advertising. Comments suggesting I sign up for online dating, which clearly has nothing to do with the article being commented on. Commercial links within posts just for the sake of it. Or false reviews of sites, products, services. That sort of thing gives blogging and the world of Web 2.0 a bad name and makes people mistrust what they read online.

Incidentally, I (not the commenter) asterisked out the f-word, which was a totally unnecessary addition. I think Mike, who provided no link back to his own website, has serious anger issues, expects way too much of the world and probably misses out on a lot of good things because of his negative attitude. Poor Mike.

Building optimum font stacks

Those of us with a development background, as opposed to design, often don't give typography much thought. We're most likely to pick a common font stack, say "Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" and use it to death.

But typography is really important. It's only when you go to a website with clearly thought out fonts that aren't overused all over the web that you realise just how much difference they can make.

The problem for developers is that it's difficult to devise your own font stack without really understanding the attributes of the different fonts. Some are wider than others (x-width), others taller (x-height), some heavier, others look different on Windows and Mac. If you don't match them up well it can throw your design off balance.

This post on A Way Back talks about optimum font stacks. It includes a useful table that looks at the percentage of Macs and PCs with certain fonts loaded. It then takes a handful of websites as examples and makes suggestions as to the optimum font stacks for them. Less common fonts are moved up the stack so they're more likely to be used. Mac fonts are matched with similar Windows fonts. Fonts that are wider than the desired font are removed or replaced. And so on.

This is a useful resource for web developers, giving you much of the information you may require to design your own font stacks. Better than that, it gives some marvellous suggestions of font stacks that you can re-use on your own site.

Notepad++ Tips and Tricks

As regular readers will know, I'm a great fan of free software. I use Notepad++ for most of my code editing. Here are a few useful tips and tricks I've picked up along the way. Much of this stuff is standard for a text editor but not necessarily that easy to find in Notepad++.

1. View in browser: You can easily view your open HTML file in a browser by clicking on Run. Choose from IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Or select Run... and browse to another executable. You can also update the shortcuts.xml file to add another browser, or change the location of a browser executable.
2. Basic version control: By turning on Verbose backup (Settings > Backup/Auto-Completion) you can set up Notepad++ to implement very basic revision control. Every time you save a file, Notepad++ will save a "clean" version in a backup sub-folder called nppBackup. That is, the version that you last saved, with none of your recent changes. The backup filename is appended with a date and timestamp so you end up with a new backup for every change. It probably goes without saying that it's a good idea to periodically delete the ones you don't want. Even if you're using some kind of version control this can be useful between check-ins.
3. Auto-completion: Whilst you're in the Backup/Auto-Completion screen set it to auto-complete functions.
4. Create templates: Notepad++ doesn't have the concepts of templates but I decided to set up my own. I created a templates folder and saved a few varieties of basic HTML files, including DOCTYPE, external CSS and JS calls, and an empty body tag. I did this for XHTML Strict and HTML4 Strict, with variations for JQuery and CSS 960grid. I open the relevant template and then Save As... to create my new file.
5. Close tags: You can use TextFX to automatically close any XHTML tags. Go to TextFX > TextFX > Settings > Autoclose XHTML/XML . There are a whole host of other useful TextFX features, such as converting case and quotes, escaping and unescaping characters, submitting to W3 validators, running HTMLTidy and a whole host of other features I haven't yet found a need for.
6. Create new tab group: Similar to Visual Studio's New Vertical Tab Group, you can view documents (or tabbed groups of documents) side-by-side using View > Move/Clone Current Document > Move to Other View. F8 then toggles between these views. Choosing to Clone effectively implements split screen and any changes made to one view of the document will be replicated in the other.
7. Use bookmarks to navigate large documents: When reading through large code files I often spend much of my time scrolling between two or more parts of the file. Clicking between the line number and the line adds a bookmark. I can then easily navigate from one bookmark to the next using F2 (down) and Shift+F2 (up).

SEO: Infographic of important concepts

Infographic. Now there's a cool word. Information in a graphic. It really is a picture telling a story. This is a great infographic from Datadial all about search engine optimisation. It seems like it would be a useful at-a-glance reference for anyone trying to promote a website and improve its search ranking.



For a more detailed description of what is being depicted you can check out HostWisely's Infographic Important Aspects of SEO. But I think the infographic pretty much says it all.