Archive for November, 2009

More privacy for you.

Monday, November 16th, 2009

For more than seven years I have used Sitemeter to see and analyze the traffic to my website. The service was originally recommended to me by Jörg Kantel, but in recent years I grew more and more disenchanted by Sitemeter – they teamed up with different advertising partners, made their JavaScript more complex, and there is also the ongoing privacy related discussion. In addition, because it could only count those visits that actually accessed the JavaScript code that is embedded into a HTML page, Sitemeter did not count those who would not activate the script. So the count missed out on those who block JavaScript and it also never counted access to the PDF, audio and video files that I host here.
In spite of all of these disadvantages, there was no real alternative for me, since Google Analytics is even worse when it comes to data collection, and since I did not have access to the webserver logs. All of this changed a few months ago when zedat, FU’s IT unit made it possible to access the weblogs for the userpage that they host. Since that change, I have now and then experimented with this feature, and with the help of the nice staff at zedat, I was able to set up a working solution using cron jobs and Visitors. Although Visitors is somewhat dated and not as feature-rich as I would like, it is good enough to finally get rid of Sitemeter. (And installing/using it does not require a lot of technical skills.)
So beginning today, accessing my website will: 1. better preserve your privacy and 2. be faster, since my pages are now completely JavaScript free and since your browser won’t have to access several different domains to load a single page. Win-win situation for you and me!
Sitemeter’s final count for this site was: 128,247 Visits and 193,571 Page Views.

The route, the body & the view. Investigations into agency and perception along the Norwegian Tourist Route.

Friday, November 13th, 2009

This is the title of the presentation that I gave last week. I was very kindly invited to present my work on the Norwegian Tourist Route in the research seminar of Uppsala University’s Department of Social and Economic Geography. As usual, I recorded the presentation on my laptop and I have now uploaded it. If you have a modern web browser like Firefox (3.5 and up), Safari (3.1 and up) or Chrome, you can watch the video right here.

The whole presentation took about an hour – it was very nice for me to be able to talk about my work with enough time to allow for the inclusion of a substantial amount of what some people call data (there are five video clips and a lot of photographs included in the presentation). The discussion after the talk and later in the evening was really productive and the whole atmosphere of the visit was very welcoming and nice. I extend my heartfelt thanks to the great folks in Uppsala!