Troubleshooting changes in Analytics: Bounce rate down: Page views up caused by second Matomo / Google tracking code

Hi all, just a quick dip into website analytics today! Over the years I have learned that watching your analytics like they are drying paint after you make big changes to the site is a great way to…. find errors and be disappointed! (Not kidding unfortunatly) After most major website revamps I have been involved…Continue reading Troubleshooting changes in Analytics: Bounce rate down: Page views up caused by second Matomo / Google tracking code

GDPR: you are allowed to maintain a blacklist, suppression list or stoplist. You are also allowed to freak out and panic.

In May the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force (and no, brexit won’t get us out of it – still no benefit to brexit. Sorry.) In my view this is shaping up be a complicated piece of law for small businesses to follow, both intellectually and technically. Worryingly, I’ve not heard much…Continue reading GDPR: you are allowed to maintain a blacklist, suppression list or stoplist. You are also allowed to freak out and panic.

copy-pasting data from website table to libreoffice, formatting it as a csv in geddit

Yet another task getting data out of a fairly nasty/incoherent web-based table and moving it into LibreOffice for sorting/project planning. Presumably this is all “easier” with scripting but I don’t have the time/patience/inclination to learn, so here is my hacky method! It worked for 95% of my data, so I had 5 of 100 lines…Continue reading copy-pasting data from website table to libreoffice, formatting it as a csv in geddit

Removing button names etc from a list of blogs/files/emails copied from a website (Gedit, Fedora)

Often if I have copied a list of blogs, files or emails from an app or website, where there is no export function, button names such as “Edit” and “Delete” will copy over. Often in a small list of items there will be several repeated junk phrases for each item of text I actually need.…Continue reading Removing button names etc from a list of blogs/files/emails copied from a website (Gedit, Fedora)

Quickly removing date/time stamps from a text file using find and replace (Gedit, Fedora)

I have been writing a lot recently about little obstacles I have come across while helping the Church of England move content from their old sites to their new ones. Making a list of all the content to be moved is often the first job, but many of the older/proprietary platforms don’t have the ability…Continue reading Quickly removing date/time stamps from a text file using find and replace (Gedit, Fedora)