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. […]
Jedi SAS Tricks: These aren’t the droids… Episode 1
How the power of the Force makes ridding yourself of problematic characters so much easier! I recently was invited to become an alternate instructor for Ron Cody’s SAS Business Knowledge Series class, “SAS Functions by Example”, and had the privilege…
Three statistics books for introductory SAS students
Recently, this question was asked of our SAS training instructors: For a SAS Programming 1: Essentials student, what would be a good book recommendation for a Statistics book? Here are the recommendations (in no particular order): Step-by-Step Basic St…
New Year’s Resolution: Find a New Job with LinkedIn (Part II)
LinkedIn.com is fast becoming a way for professionals to not only network but also look for work in a more clever way. Last week, I discussed ways to enhance your LinkedIn Profile, but there’s…
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Random seeds
A footnote toward Rick Wilkin’s recent article “How to Lie with a Simulation”. (Sit in front of a laptop w/o SAS; have to port all SAS/IML codes into R)
Generated 10 seeds randomly to run Stochastic simulation of Buffon’s needle experiment by R…