Tech and life

Another small milestone here at Tech and Life – the 100th post! Time to thank everyone who’s been following the blog so far – I’m enjoying doing it in my spare time and am really encouraged by the subscriptions to the feed since I began about 18 months ago.

I’m trying to improve the blog when I can and have just signed up to FeedBurner, primarily to add the option for readers to subscribe by email for those who prefer that. I’m a little slow at getting round to it and my apologies. Anyway, please sign up for emails in the side bar if you prefer to receive updates that way. I post at most 3 times a week so I won’t be flooding your inbox! Be sure to add our email address to your ’safe list’ in your email client to make sure newsletters reach your inbox and aren’t diverted to your bulk or spam folders. Let me know if you have any problems with the subscription or any improvements I can make.

I’ve also added Google Translate to the sidebar. Although it’s not perfect, you may prefer to have this option to translate the blog into your own language. I’ve blogged about automated blog translation before. I had some problems getting it to translate to other languages and discovered that the Firefox extension Flashblock causes a conflict with Google Translate. Disabling the extension solved the problem. So if you’re using Google Translate and getting the error message: Error: The server could not complete your request. Try again later, try disabling the Flashblock extension in Firefox.

I’ve also recently added the Wapple Architect plugin so this blog can be viewed on mobile phones.

Finally, I hope to have more guest posts in the coming months – look forward to the first coming up soon. Oh and if you have any suggestions for the blog or for blog topics, drop a comment below.

Image credit: Mzelle Biscotte

If you’re new to Tech and Life, please subscribe to the RSS feed or for email updates at the top right of this page.

Another Google Reader topic today to follow on from my last post. This annoyance has been bugging me for a while and I’ve found a solution to it today.

More and more webmasters and bloggers are using FeedBurner to manage their RSS feeds. FeedBurner has introduced a feature which allows tracking of feed clicks in Google Analytics so as to track visitors from FeedBurner feeds. Problem is that when Google Analytics tracks FeedBurner visitors, it appends the feed item URL with Google Analytics tags, e.g. utm_source=feedburner, utm_medium=feed, etc. I’m sure you’ve all seen this. If you hover over the link to the feed URL in Google Reader before clicking it, it will start something like http://feedproxy.google.com…. Just as an example, here’s what appeared in the browser address bar after I clicked a link in Google Reader to a web page on Techie Buzz:

http://techie-buzz.com/google-chrome/google-chrome-now-supports-greasemonkey-scripts.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techiebuzz+%28Techie+buzz%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Pretty ugly. If you now bookmark that web page in Delicious or Diigo, all the tracking stuff is included in the link. I don’t know about you but I just want to bookmark the URL of the web page without all that tracking data. So from the above URL, I just want:

http://techie-buzz.com/google-chrome/google-chrome-now-supports-greasemonkey-scripts.html

You could of course delete all that stuff off the end before you bookmark it, but there’s a simpler way to remove this tracking data in Firefox and Google Chrome. In Firefox, it involves installing a Greasemonkey script, while in Chrome you just install an extension.

Firefox: Greasemonkey script to remove FeedBurner tracking data

First you have to install Greasemonkey. If you haven’t already done this, visit my last post for more info. Then install the FeedBurner Tracking Query Stripper from here. Once installed, when you click a link in Google Reader, the URL will load initially showing the tracking data then, after a second or two, it will magically disappear.

Chrome: Unburner extension to remove Feedburner tracking data

If Google Chrome is your browser, then install the Unburner extension from here. Again, once installed, when you click a link in Google Reader, the URL will load initially showing the tracking data then it will be stripped out.

Now when you follow a link in Google Reader in Firefox or Chrome, all the tracking analytics will be stripped out and the web page will load as it should.