Google Analytics unblocks the Web w/ Async support | Hacker News Reader

Google Analytics unblocks the Web w/ Async support

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65 pointsalexandros12 comments

googles actual post about it: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-analytics-laun...

I think the NBGA API much nicer: http://925html.com/code/non-blocking-google-analytics-integr...

I usually use an adaptation of this, to take out the extra code that supports prototype and YUI (my choice is jQuery). This thing is super easy to use:

jQuery(document).ready(function() { ga().config({ id:'UA-xxxxxxx-x' }).track(); });

It queues up any track calls and pushes them onto GA as soon as it loads.

That's fine if you only need _trackPageview. The Google solution provides more capabilities though. Also, be careful of using 3rd party solution. They don't always work correctly. The jQuery plugin for GA used to cache-bust every request to ga.js, which definitely slows down your page.

They've also moved away from document.write. Now we can use google analytics on pages served as XHTML without resorting to these types of hacks: http://www.the-xavi.com/articles/operation-is-not-supported-...

I notice something like this in the snippet:

(function() { ... })();

What's that all about?

That executes the code in a local scope, so that any variables defined within that block don't leak outside of its namespace.

Thanks!

This works even cooler when you want to minify your code:

MyLongClassName = function() {};

function(_c) { _c.prototype.method1 = ...; _c.prototype.method2 = ...; }(MyLongClassName);

This allows something like YUI compressor to shorten _c local variable for every method definition, rather than store "MyLongClassName" for each one.

Define an anonymous function that takes no arguments, and execute it without assigning it to a variable. It's often used in javascript to keep things out of the global scope.

The first response was perfectly adequate. Let's keep threads clean. Read other responses before responding.

This is a good move, but I think jsHub's approach of separating the page meta-data and the JavaScript that reads it is better.

http://jshub.org/blog/2009/10/17/universal_tag_or_universal_...

Jeez, finally...

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