Today I am going to write about an excellent application, which I discovered yesterday. The main reason why I hated checking out my Google Analytics reports was that I hated logging in to my Analytics account. My personal Google account is different from the one I use for website related uses, including Adsense, Sitemaps and Analytics. Whenever I try to check my personal mails and Analytics account together, I get logged out from the former. That was when I discovered Google Analytics Reporting Suite based on Adobe Integrated Runtime (Previosly Apollo), developed by Nico.

Google Analytics Reporting suite is a desktop application based on AIR, which allows you to access your Google Analytics Reports directly from your desktop. GARS provides a much better interface compared to the original web application. It also implements almost all the features provided by the web application.

The program allows you to manage multiple profiles from different Google Accounts directly from the program. The login credetials will be saved on your computer so that you don’t have to re-login every time you check your reports.

Here is a screencast of the previous version

Highlighted features of GARS (from AboutNico.be)

• Easy profile selection and account management »
• Use multiple profiles from different Analytics accounts »
• All visitors, traffic and content reports available »
• Tabbed interface to easily switch between reports »
• Data drilldown, goal values, data segmentation »
• Animated, interactive graphs »
• Advanced data grids with filtering and paging »
• Switch between interactive reports or PDF reports »
• Site overlay view »
• Exports to PDF, Excel and XML »

The program is still in its beta stage with beta 2 released on October 5th. I recommend everyone  to tryout the program and provide feedback to Nico, so that it can be improved further. Version 1.0 of the reporting suite is expected to be released by early 2008. A sneak peak of Google Analytics AIR 1.0 was provided and the new version is much prettier.

Google does not provide an official API to access Google Analytics data by external programs. Fortunately, programmers have developed unofficial APIs[1, 2] for doing the same, even though Google is remaining silent on the legality of using it. Google Analytics Reporting Suite is also based on an unofficial API developed by Nico, by studying the working of the web application for months. Fortunately, both Google and Adobe extended support to Nico for further developing the application. GARS is included in Adobe’s Showcase program and Google has offered assistance in making the program more secure.

Now that I have Google Analytics Reporting Suite installed, I now check my Google Analytics reports 4 - 5 times a day. Thank you Nico. 

Downloads 

• Google Analytics Reporting Suite
• Adobe Integrated Runtime

Yesterday, while fixing some browser compatibility issues of my new theme, I was surprised to know that my homepage was over 400 KB in size and took more than 30 seconds to completely load with my DSL connection. More than 80 files, including images, javascript and css, were embedded within the page.

I decided to optimize the page and found that the following actions can be taken to decrease the load time.

• Reduce the number of requests
  First of all, I opened up my theme’s stylesheet and found several unused classes with image backgrounds and bullets. I removed those classes and removed all references to non-existant files.
• Reduce the total download size
  I tried removing unwanted markup and html comments left by my theme and plugins. But that did not create much difference in size. Next I converted some of the images from PNG to JPEG format. This reduced the total size by over 30 KB. But most of the page size was due to the embedded Javascript and CSS files. For example, the prototype javascript library is over 90 KB in size, which on compression get reduced to 22KB. Hence I used Apache Module mod_deflate to compress my files dynamically for gzip enabled browsers. I used the following code in my .htaccess file to compress files of the following mime types  - text/css,  text/html,  text/plain,  text/xml and application/x-javascript. For this to work on your server, you should have mod_deflate enabled. Most webhosts have this enabled. If not, you may also try  PHP mod_gzip or ZLib compression.

  # Insert filter
  SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/html text/plain text/xml application/x-javascript
  
  # Netscape 4.x has some problems...
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
  
  # Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
  
  # MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
  # BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
  
  # NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
  # the above regex won't work. You can use the following
  # workaround to get the desired effect:
  BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
  
  # Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
  Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

• Cache files client side
  Almost all browsers have the ability to cache files on your computer for faster loading. If we set the expiry time of the file, the browser will check for updated content only after the specified time. We can use the Apache module mod_expires for this purpose. The following code will request the browser to cache all files for three hours. This can make the browser download the file only once during a session, but will update the content on next visit. You may also use the ExpiresByType directive to set different time for images, javascript and css files.

  # Cache all files for the next 3 hours
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresDefault "access plus 3 hours"

Results

The final result was great. The homepage size got reduced to 159 KB, which was less than half of the original size. The page load time also reduced to 19.3 seconds from about 32 seconds.

The load time and page size were calculated using the Web Page Speed Report tool from www.websiteoptimization.com.

Make sure you backup your current .htaccess file before trying the above code. So that you can revert back if something goes wrong.