Did you know that a selection of our most popular SAS training classes are offered in conjunction with SAS Global Forum at a 15% discount? If you’re planning to attend SAS Global Forum, arrive a few days early and take a class. These training cla…
… and A Happy New Year!
It’s hard to believe that 2012 is upon us: it feels like just yesterday that I was heavily embroiled in 2011 planning. I thought I’d take a minute to look back at the year that was, and a sneak peek at the year that will be. Now if only I could find a …
Code Katas
Last week I made a brief mention of Code Katas and how they can help you as a form code practice. Let’s find out some more.
The basic concept surrounding Code Katas encapsulates the ideas that a) we are professional coders, b) practice improves one’…
Engage More Closely With NOTE:
The NOTE: blog is powered by Google Blogger. Google have rolled out a number of improvements to Blogger recently. One of those improvements is support for threaded commenting, which means that it is now much easier to differentiate between whether some…
SAS BI: Looking at Google Analytics for Popular Blog Topics
This past week I have been studying the Google Analytics data to determine the best topics to discuss in the upcoming month and to prepare the SAS Glo Fo 2012 conference. Google Analytics allows me to measure which posts get the most hits when posted and continue to be popular or referenced. I’ll unveil my little known, but highly coveted analytics process. How’s that for some hype? Getting the Google Analytics Data In a past article, I discussed how I extracted the data from Google Analytics using Excellent Analytics. The following figure shows my query in the Excellent Analytics tool, the data results, and the results in SAS Enterprise Guide. The data consists of the date, post path and title (with URL), source (how person came to site), and visitor type. It’s probably obvious why I would want the date, post, and source but what is not so obvious is visitor type. Visitor Type allows me analyze what topics bring new visitors to the site as well as the topics that retain visitors. Cleaning Up the Data My original plan was to use MS Excel to complete this analysis since I thought it would be simple. However, I realized that […]
Simple Python Scrapper for Daytum
I use one of the major running sites to keep track of my running log but unfortunately there’s no public API. The underlying html is a mess and would be utterly complicated to scrape. For this training cycle, I’ve been keeping a second log using Daytum since their iPhone app makes updating it way easy. […]