I’ve been looking very hard recently at jQuery as it seems to provide such a useful lightweight toolkit. My background is Microsoft .net and I have been using the ASP.NET AJAX framework but jQuery has been on my radar because the buzz online about it is huge and it just seems to do some great stuff so easily that would fit in well with the AJAX features.

Well looks like Microsoft (and Nokia) have been keeping a close eye too as they’ve announced they’re going to make jQuery part of the official development platform. Excellent news and I’ll certainly be using jQuery in the very near future.

I posted a little while back about Google’s better support for Flash movies. At the time I was more worried about the potential for abuse by black hat SEOs however an article dissecting in more detail about what Google can and can’t see in Flash movies has reassured me slightly and what’s more it backs up my belief that if you want to be listing in search engines relying on Flash isn’t going to help.

The biggest thing that I noticed involved where JavaScript is used to embed a Flash movie into the page. In these cases it is unlikely Google will be able to access the Flash movie and therefore your content is again worthless. So if you’re using the fantastic standards compliant swfobject make sure you include backwards compatible object tags to ensure Google sees your movies! Or better still only use Flash where you can’t do the same thing in HTML and CSS.

I love Google Analytics and can always be found looking through all the pretty reports it generates for various websites I am involved with. I never cease to be amazed at the various routes people find a website.

One major downside of Google Analytics however is its reliance on JavaScript which makes some things on a website difficult to track. One example of a figure I would love to know is the true number of subscriptions to an RSS feed.

I’ve found a half way house solution to this posted by Hamlet Batista which tracks people clicking on RSS links on a website using the same code I use to track conversions on dynamic pages. For your reference this is:

<a href=http://www.digital-rant.co.uk/feed/ title=”Subscribe to my feed” rel=”alternate” onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker(’/tracking/feed’);”>

Or if you are using the latest Google Analytics code:

<a href=http://www.digital-rant.co.uk/feed/ title=”Subscribe to my feed” rel=”alternate” onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/tracking/feed’);”>

Where “/tracking/feed” is your goal URL setup in Google Analytics.

 However this code makes the following assumptions:

1. Everyone subscribes using the RSS links within the page and not the RSS details in the page header (picked up by various browsers).
2. Everyone that follows an RSS link actually subscribes to the feed.

If anyone has any other suggestions to overcome these problems give me a shout - I’d love to know! In the meantime I’ll have to survive on these approximate figures.

Of course if I had the cash I’d upgrade to Google Analytics’ big brother Urchin 6 which recently came out of beta which sorts these issues but as I don’t have $2995 I’ll have to carry on as I am.