I have spent the past weekend moving my old (infrequently updated) blog from Blogger to WordPress. Blogger sent me an email saying I was one of a handful of users that used blogger to publish to another site via FTP and that they were going to discontinue FTP support. This makes sense to me, but I use my web server for many other things and didn’t want to go with a fully hosted blogging solution like Blogger or Squarespace (which I love for other uses!).

So, I have made the switch to WordPress, which has been pretty easy (especially as my hosting company, GoDaddy has an easy-install option.) Importing from Blogger was straightforward and I have spent most of my time tweaking the widgets on the right column (some of which needed some extra coding to get them right). Now I am messing with themes… many of which are pretty awful.

It has been a busy few months! We have been finishing up our wedding planning general pieces and now focussing on the details, of which there are many. At work, I have shifted to working solely on Google Analytics, which is great because it is a product I really enjoy working on and it now means I can focus my energy on it. I have been speaking at a few events and with some of our advertisers to try and get their websites to be as optimized as possible for conversion rate.

Hoping to try and get posting here more often. It’s just very difficult to find the time!

Ran into this problem while working on a project at work. Couldn’t find this answer anywhere, so I thought I would post it.

Add the YouTube embedded player code to your page as usual, but add the highlighted parameters:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/ZAOx_HuV3TU&hl=en
&fs=1&color1=0×006699&color2=0×54abd61″></param>
<param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param>
<param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param>
<embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/ZAOx_HuV3TU&hl=en
&fs=1&color1=0×006699&color2=0×54abd6&enablejsapi=1”
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always”
allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″ id=’ytvideo’></embed>
</object>

Make sure that the regular tracking code is loaded at the bottom of the page.
Add the following javascript to the top of your page:

<script>
var playedOnce = false;

function onYouTubePlayerReady(playerid) {
player = document.getElementById(‘ytvideo’);
player.addEventListener(‘onStateChange’, ‘youtubeEvent’);
}

function youtubeEvent(state) {
if (state == 1) {
if (!playedOnce) {
playedOnce = true;
pageTracker._trackEvent(‘video’, ‘unique_play_per_page’);
}
pageTracker._trackEvent(‘video’, ‘play’);
return;
}
if (state == 0) {
pageTracker._trackEvent(‘video’, ‘ended’);
return;
}
}
</script>

This will generate three types of page events:
1. ‘play’ is an event everytime the player starts playing. A play event is also when someone pauses and starts playing or scrolls to a different part of the video. This is why counting number of ‘plays’ can be misleading.
2. ‘unique_play_per_page’ counts ‘play’ events, but only one per page load.
3. ‘ended’ counts videos that have been played to the end.

I have decided that I need to lose weight before the wedding next year. However, I often get bored of most things that weight loss requires (i.e. exercise and eating better). I don’t mind exercise if it is hidden as something else. I was in better shape when playing rugby, but I am not allowed to do that anymore (a hit to the head after the orbital blow out fracture could mean that I lose vision in my right eye.)