The web community lives in a world of numbers. Tools like Google Analytics, Mint, Campaign Monitor and others do a wonderful job of helping put concrete numbers in the hands of site owners allowing them to make informed decisions about their business.

Last week ReadWriteWeb had an article The Death of the Pageview which provided an overview of some ways the industry has moved from simple “clicks” or “views” into more meaningful metrics. While it is great that we can now measure campaign conversion rates or watch the cow paths form through the sites we build we must always ask ourselves if the analytics are measuring the correct things, or if numbers or trends can even help answer a particular question.

Often the goal of a new technology or new feature for an exiting technology is to lead a silent existence while making the owner’s life easier. Rather then being in your face forcing you to notice it, or worse, not working as intended and doubly frustrating the device’s owner it hums merrily along unnoticed.

I’ve been shooting steadily with the Nikon D90 dSLR since November of 2008. It struck me only last week in part because I was shooting some sky photos — which are notorious for making dust apparent — that in all that time I hadn’t had to do a manual sensor cleaning like I had often with my previous camera. The built in sensor shake/cleaning that Nikon has added to some of its recent camera bodies, and that triggers automatically each time the camera turns off or on, just works.

There are some interesting new things going on the world of web site layouts with CSS and JavaScript all the time. Tricks and tools to add to a client side developer’s arsenal for making flexible, content accommodating navigation, layouts and presentations. Though I wouldn’t give away any of our progress, I can’t help but wonder if sometimes the amount of work we ask a visitor’s browser to do is overkill. One way to shift this workload off the browser — without placing undo burden onto the site management staff or its budget by requiring a high level of technical expertise with each site update — is to move the it to an offline or backend CMS tool creating static code for publication. This is particularly useful when doing multiple site deployments with a similar theme or building different localized site versions where the need for flexibility in type doesn’t change from user to user, but from content update to content update or deployment to deployment.

Through the use of fairly simple to create build tools we can create ‘static’ CSS for deployment and consumption and trim the amount and complexity of layout code sent with each page.

A while back I posted instructions on geotagging photos with any GPS capable cell phone or device. Prompted by a question from one of my students (oh hey, I should talk about my new gig sometime!) and the fact the post is one of the more popular around here I thought the post deserved revisiting.

Since 2008 I’ve updated my camera body, gotten an iPhone, and streamlined both the number of devices I carry and the workflow for getting geographic data into my photos. Still, the premise of the old post hasn’t changed — you can encode any photo you take from any digital camera you have by syncing the photos timestamp with your saved GPS information.

Here’s how I’m currently tagging photos from my Nikon D90 with information saved on my iPhone using the RunKeeper Pro app.

Went though a draft of this in my head as a funny Q&A with myself — 19 questions asking if I’d need the newly announced device to help me get existing work done better or if I could expect to jump in tomorrow helping clients create content for a newly introduced publishing model all answered with a simple “NO”. Followed by question 20 “will I still preorder it?” answered with a “Probably”. What I realized as I typed it up was that it all came down to work value vs. consumer value. As someone who is a somewhat recent iPhone owner and a long time Apple laptop user there was no solid work value I could find in this new type of 3G computing device but there is still plenty of consumer value as a consolidation and update of devices we’ve seen before.