Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: tracking

  • CE / Vista Undocumented Workspaces

    On the WebCT Users email list (hosted by Blackboard) there is a discussion about a mysterious directory called unmarshall which suddenly appeared. We found it under similar circumstances as others by investigating why a node consumed so much disk space. Failed command-line restores end up in this unmarshall directory. Unmarshalling in Java jargon means: converting…

  • Page View Metric Dying

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    First Metricocracy measured hits. Pictures and other junk on pages inflated the results so Metricocracy decided on either unique visitors or page views. Now, the Metricocracy wants us to measure attention. Attention is engagement, how much time users spend on a page. What do we really want to know? Really it is the potential value…

  • Finding Sessions

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    Clusters can making finding where a user was working a clusterf***. Users end up on a node, but they don’t know which node. Heck, we are ahead of the curve to get user name, date, and time. Usually checking all the nodes in the past few days can net you the sessions. Capturing the session…

  • User Interface v. SQL Reports and Tracking

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    Blackboard Vista tracks student activity. This tracking data is viewed as a critical feature of Vista. Our instructors depended on the information until we revoked their ability to run reports themselves due to performance issues. Campus administrators can still generate reports (though some still fail). We doubt the solution to this is Blackboard improving the…

  • Better Way to Count

    Our awesome sysadmins have put the user agent into our AWStats so we are tracking these numbers now. They discovered something I overlooked. Netscape 4.x is 10 times more used than 7.x or 8.x. Wowsers! Some people really do not give up on the past. Back in the Netscape is dead post, I used this…

  • RE 2007: GeorgiaVIEW Meeting (Pre-Conference)

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    I am blogging from the pre-conference GeorgiaVIEW meeting @ Rock Eagle yesterday afternoon and this morning. I enjoy connecting with people around the state of Georgia who use our Vista system. Most of them do not make it to BbWorld. Some hot topics: Alternatives to Blackboard Vista Training Content repository Returning Reports and Tracking to…

  • BbWorld Presentation Redux Part I – Automation

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    Much of what I might write in these posts about Vista is knowledge accumulated from the efforts of my coworkers. I’ve decided to do a series of blog posts on our presentation at BbWorld ’07, on the behalf of the Georgia VIEW project, Maintaining Large Vista Installations (2MB PPT). I wrote the bit about tracking…

  • Its 10:34 Do You Know Where Your Tracking Files Are?

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    One of my co-workers says about tracking, “One of the big selling points to [Blackboard] Vista is the wealth of tracking data for auditing, grade challenges, and catching cheaters.” Certainly, Reports and Tracking in Blackboard’s Vista 3 is one of the more favorite tools. So making sure the data gets there is critically important. The…

  • Cancelled

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    You’d think a city would make life hell on venue owners and fine advertisers for making them spend thousands of employee man hours cleaning up advertisements pasted onto walls of buildings, benches, etc. Punishment is only effective with the subject notices and can tie back to the cause-effect relationship. Tracking down, fining, and hearing appeals…