With every new Zend Studio release (still beta) comes a new PDT version: this time based on Eclipse 3.5 Galileo.

While Eclipse Galileo brings some nice new features and bug-fixes (of which many are not important to PHP developers, but nonetheless) PDT actually impresses the most with PHP 5.3 support: syntax coloring and validation with namespaces awareness. More about this in the release notes.

The best news in my opinion: since the software/plugin/update manager of Eclipse underwent some major refactoring, it’s biggest disadvantage may as well disappear! The only sane way to upgrade from 3.4 (or older) to 3.5 is still: delete your old version and unpack the new one, but lets hope this was the last time…

And last but not least: Mylyn integration got even better (I really need to dedicate a post to this).

Be sure to try the new PDT version!

A question many people and businesses probably have asked themselves at least once.

Earlier this month, Marketingsherpa put up a short post about the answer to that question. They state that you can as easily participate by commenting on other blogs as you can by setting up your own.
While they insinuate that blogging is hard and time consuming, commenting is certainly easier (be sure to set up some kind of profile page to link back too though).

For me however, it has been very satisfying already!

Finding out why your visitors do not buy anything or don’t take any other action you want them to take does not need to be that hard.

This post will be an attempt to show how easy it is to get an insight into how many potential “converters” leave your site before they buy anything (or perform any other goal) and why they do this.

First of all: make sure you set goals in Google Analytics. In this post, I assume you only have one goal, but be sure to mark everything that is of interest to you (as the site owner) as a goal. If you didn’t do this upfront, you’ll have to wait for some time so you have enough data to work with (let’s say at least 150 – 200 conversions).

Secondly: have a look at the people that convert. Because it is a predefined segment, select it like this:

• Open up the advanced segments selection on the top right of your Google Analytics overview.
• In the “Default Segments” list, select “Visits with Conversions” and click “Apply”.

As you would expect, you now see information for visitors that completed your goal. One important note: if you have multiple goals, be sure to monitor them separately.

Have a look at the “Visitors” – “Overview” report, you will see some useful averages for visitors that converted. E.g.: you’ll notice people that convert visit at average X number of pages or stay X minutes on your site. Write them down or something (yes, with a good old pencil).

With this information: advanced segmentation to the rescue (again)! It is as easy as this:

• Open up the advanced segments selection again.
• Click “Create a new advanced segment”.
• Add one or more of the averages you have in front of you to the new segment. E.g. Page Depth greater than or equal to 15. As long as you have enough results, segmenting more precise can have advantages (as long as you don’t generalize the outcome).
• Save the segment and apply it to the reports.

You now basically look over the shoulder of people that leave your site before they convert. You can for instance notice:

• where they left your site (”Content” – “Top Exit Pages”).
• whether many of them return more than once (”Visitors” – “New vs. Returning”).
• if specific countries/languages pop out (”Visitors” – “Map Overlay”/”Languages”).
• if any OS or browser pops out (”Visitors” – “Browser Capabilities”).
• whether specific content is notably more popular (”Content” – “Top Content”).

Comparing this to the people that convert can be useful. Did not-converters

• reach you from a different source (”Traffic Sources” – “All Traffic Sources”)
• land on another page (”Content” – “Top Landing Pages”)

than converters?

Remember: there really is no end to this – segment and analyze as much as you can. One segment at a time. People in one segment could be leaving for different reasons than people in another.

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you get stuck somewhere!

Gather valuable feedback on your designs, artwork, photos,… by simply waiting. Just waiting. For free.

A nice new web 2.0 application, fivesecondtest, provides a platform for images to be “reviewed” by the public (stored at Amazon S3 of course). It’s dead simple: you upload the image and wait. After some time people will have reviewed your image and marked what drew their attention in the first five seconds they saw your image.

Whether it is a screenshot of your site, a fresh mock-up, a (stock) photograph,… you name it and it gets reviewed. All without creating an account or leaving any personal information.

Be sure to review some too!

Edit: use of Calibri font makes it look nice on Windows.

After getting rid of my Windows Live address, I started to move my domain e-mail to Google Apps (GMail).

Before I moved to Google, my domain e-mail (strictlyphp.com/strictlyphp.be) was handled by my hosting company and I also maintained the e-mail address my ISP provided and the GMail account I checked once in a while.

This has certainly wasted many hours in the past.

Google Apps to the rescue: you create an account, add your domains, point your MX records to Google “et voila”. After everything is set up, you can access your e-mail just like a regular GMail account. This means that you can set up POP3 or IMAP access from within your preferred e-mail client and you can set up your account to fetch messages from external accounts (the ISP account and the regular GMail account I already had in my case).

I had only one difficulty actually: the choice between POP3 and IMAP. I first picked IMAP but I soon realised this was not the optimal choice if you process many messages and maintain many folders. Because it is a synchronization protocol, it is not optimal for offline usage and is of course slower than an offline storage (which is the case for POP3). POP3 on the other hand is not ideal for multiple clients or multiple locations, but you at least don’t need to be connected to search your mailbox.

Because I fetch mail from my laptop, desktop and mobile, the Google Apps mailbox is configured to keep a copy of each message which is unnecessary and can become rather large. There seems to be no solution though: a setup with the setting “leave a copy on server” while fetching e-mail doesn’t work with Google.

Like you may have noticed, you can also not merge your existing regular GMail account with Google Apps and I wouldn’t recommend deleting it either, since the Apps accounts aren’t fully compatible with all Google services which you currently access with your GMail account.

If you doubt about Google Apps in terms of e-mail, maybe the other applications can convince you: Calendar, Mobile, Contacts,… Possible downtime may be the only drawback, but the Premium account (50 USD per year per user) with a 99.9% uptime guarantee provides an answer.

Once in a while (not that much actually, but enough to write something about it) I get a question from friends or family, newly graduated or experienced, about what their next career move should be.

Not that I know that much about it, but let’s assume you want to find the appropriate job/hobby related to IT for yourself.

When I was at school we basically had to choose between development (programming) or networking. A fairly easy choice that, as we realised later, would define the rest of our life. Luckily our school provided good guidance (just kidding).

With the Internet and everything around it evolving at warp-speed, the options you have are far less obvious.

Of course you should still look at yourself and think about whether or not you like to do development. But let’s say you do. In that case and in my opinion, the language you pick is not that important. Although at school they probably still divide classes that way, it is good to realize you will have to switch between languages someday (possibly multiple times, who knows). And as Dave Thomas (The Pragmatic Programmer) says: it’s almost a requirement to keep an eye on multiple languages/technologies.

While you should not be guided by the salaries mentioned, the IT Jobs Watch provides multiple views on the current job market. One basic fact that you could derive from this list is what sector/language/tool is becoming increasingly popular (in the UK, but probably everywhere). While that may not be the optimal choice (and I’m not even saying you should base your choice on this!), it may as well play a role in your decision process.

Note: if you are interested in the salaries mentioned, there are far better opportunities for you!

In an attempt to simplify things, I’ve eliminated my Hotmail address (which I mainly used for Windows Live Messenger) and created a new Live account based on my Gmail address.

Since I have used the Hotmail address for more than 10 years, it’s a bit of an emotional moment. Bear with me.

But, back to business. If I didn’t add you already, feel free to add my new me: sam.hauglustaine(at)gmail.com.

In case you switch Windows Live Messenger accounts often: it’s possible to import and export contacts.

Up next: link my MX records to Gmail and use it as my single inbox.

When you want to use Google Reader in offline mode so you can catch up with posts when you are not connected (yes, that happens!) you may not be able to follow the instructions stated in the Help (Dutch).

Google tells you to simply click the synchronize icon at the top right, next to “Settings” but no icon appears after you’ve installed Google Gears. Switching you preferred language to English instead of, in my case, Dutch solves that.

Since it acts the same across browsers I assume it’s a small bug for all languages except English?

Edit: Google Reader’s offline mode seems to be buggy since December last year.

Apparently price settings for telecom (broadband/mobile/land line) plans in Belgium are significantly higher than its neighbouring countries and our Belgian government has decided to do something about it.

I try to avoid posts about Belgian/Dutch subjects but this one is too big of a disgrace:

To increase competition between operators, our government has launched a site to compare different telecom offers (Dutch). I can only assume someone naively decided this is the cheapest way to get prices to drop without extra legislation and while one can doubt its effectiveness in case of (forbidden) price setting agreements between operators, it must have cost (or still costs) huge amounts of time to get up-to-date data in their application.

If you now doubt this is something a government should occupy itself with, you’re not alone.

But it gets even worse. As you may have guessed looking at the site, the underlying code is terrible. This is even more sad because, while very basic and a bit outdated, there are guidelines for creating sites from the government (Dutch).

With less work and more talented people, they could have built an application that could at least be user friendly (as an example: if you submit without some required field, everything you entered is reset) and it could have been an attempt to justify the budget spent.

Maybe it is best they just fire the one responsible for this decision. No motivation needed.

Ever wondered what the ideal heights and distances of your workspace are?

Try out the Ergotron Workspace Planner in inches or in centimeters: just enter your height en adjust your chair, desk or screen as required.

More about optimizing your workspace on Lifehacker.