There is a way to track your yahoo stores shopping cart and transaction hits using Google Analytics without paying extra money from third party software. Before starting make sure your whole site is urchined. Log into your Store Panel in yahoo small business, under Order Settings click Checkout Manager. In Checkout Manager click the tab Checkout Wrapper. The very bottom of the Checkout Wrapper page is an optional footer text area, input your urchin as the last bit of code in the text box (or the only if there is no other code) The image above illustrates where the footer text area is located.

Give analytics a few days and start checking Content Drilldown under Content Optimization. Your instial shopping cart page will come up as the folder /cgi-bin and the transaction pages come up /ymix. (image to right)

There was a class field trip to Brown library where they showcased a beautiful set of books before the computer. The first set of books were made from vellum; one side is fuzzy and the other smooth. The books with vellum were binded so every fuzzy page faced another fuzzy page. There were science books that used the same wood blocks to portray the multiple cities. The image with the map of Europe and Africa is the world a few years before Columbus documented America to Europe; the images to the right of the map are creatures you would find if you dare traveled outside the regions on the map. There is a copy of Dante’s Inferno as well as Chaucer’s collection. Most impressive is the binding and illumination of the type forms in the earlier photographs. All the photographs are in chronological order with the exception of the last two. Enjoy! Brown Book Collection

There is nothing worse than a windows operating system that struggles to open the start menu. When you need to save user data such as my documents and and favorites etc before reformat and reinstall windows but it takes 10 minutes to open my computer! Use a bootable operating system like Kanotix or Knoppix, two Linux os’s that boot from a cd. Booting these os’s takes a minute or two and it auto configures all your hardware and most the times connects you to the internet. On the desktop the hard drive will appear, use a stick drive to copy over the essential files from documents and setting. (you must change the stickdrive to be writable) This saves the aggravation of a highly infected windows. Reformat collect 100 and pass go!

It’s late 2006 and i’m looking for a mp3 player to jump start 2007. So I’m looking and looking, $60 for a mp3 player/flash drive or $300 for all that with video capabilities. Screw, I want video capabilities but don’t want to drop 3 bills. So I Hit Google and run the query minidisc software; after some snooping around I found that sony just released new sonicstage software/program that controls all previous models of netmd players that use to use OpenMG juke box which if you’ve have a minidisc player know that openmg is complete crap and would crash. Well the new sonic stage is pretty and is very similar. What’s cool is that it detects and writes to the minidisc player! Though I managed to crash the program almost as fast as I crashed my iMac after running it for 5 minutes, I’m happy.

Find drivers for your sony minidisc player here and download sonicstage here.

Well its been a few days and everywhere online all you hear if that the Wii lines and wait were much better and less dangerous than the PS3 lines. Having so experienced it myself I’d whole-heartedly agree. The whole crowd had a good feel to it. I arrived at about 10 pm the night before and I was number 23 in line. The location I was at was rumored to have about 45 units coming in so I was confident I was in the clear. A few people I had met and myself came up with the idea to get a list going and remembering a story I saw on Digg I started asking if people would mind being branded in sharpie with their number in line. This worked out well and everyone was pretty cool with the idea. There were movies on laptops with everyone invited around, a large capture the flag game as well as a whiffle ball game during the night. I was in on a 8 person game of Mario Kart on DS with all people sitting around me. Overall everyone was nice and it was a good experience.

Around 530 AM lots of older parent looking types starting showing up and the last minute people starting piling on the end of the line. At about 730 we easily had 70+ people waiting outside this Best Buy. The manager of this Best Buy made an appearance shortly there after and counted out the first 45 people. After that he told all the rest that he only had 45 Wii’s and everyone past that point would not be receiving one. Many of the people left but a few stubborn folk stuck around. 815 rolled around and they handed out the Wii tickets. Then at about 845 we were all let in and got to finally purchase our Wiis. The setup in the store was superb and everyone was painless. The last person to receive a Wii arrived at about 415 that morning.

Overall the wait wasn’t too bad and being the first time I had camped out for anything I enjoyed it, I won’t be doing it again too soon but I’m glad I got a Wii.

Now on to the Wii Review

Nintendo’s Wii is very small and a deceiving package but after getting everything hooked up my roommates and myself were ready to hit some Wii Sports. The controls work very well and all the games have a really short learning curve. The graphics are disappointing but I want to see some titles that really push the Wii because thus far most of these games are pushing the envelope. Within the first night two of our girlfriends were up and playing and actually smoked me in bowling…so much for being a gamer. The game is very easy to pick up if you have never played a game before and immediately draws in non-gamers. That is the most unbelievable thing is that it really does have an immediate universal appeal. Girlfriends, parents, young kids, etc all will love this system.

The next question is will it please the more hardcore gamers? I can say that the second title I picked up being Zelda: Twilight Princess will do this ten fold. I’m only about 3 hours into this game but so far its bringing me back to the Ocarina of time days and this is a place I glad to be back in. The game is engrossing. Major reviewing sites do this way better than I can hope to but lets just say all the hype is not wrong.

Here are a few pictures from the wait…

Isn’t it annoying that apple doesn’t set a mouse back button in os x, or even give you the option?! Well there is a cure for those of us that cannot live without a back and forward button when browsing with safari and firefox.

Unfortunately DCE hasn’t discovered a way to script this yet without relying on software, but we are working on it. Though we have figured out how to remap on Windows XP here, figures. Right now we are using a program called Steer mouse. You have the options to configure each mouse button to whatever you like, including a combination of shortcut keys. In this case we want to bind our back button (button 4) to cmd + [ open safari and your backing with ease. You can set the forward button assigning cmd + ] for mouse button 5. My forward button is set to expose shortcut keys (as seen in the image). To do this you must set temporailty unbind your expose setting to have the key register in steermouse.

Download the steermouse installer here

This script opens a window using the image dimensions as the control. When you do not want to jeopardize convention and need a Click to enlarge Button, use this code.

To call the script use a simple link.

This script is modified code found @ www.rgagnon.com