David Westerfield

Well, in this third installment of “Useful Protocol-Intelligent Javascript Code,” (not intending it to become a series, ha) I was sent a link by Matt Hinze where someone has already written some code that will do this exact thing, particularly for Google analytics js code. Take a look:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
document.write( ‘<scr’+’ipt type=”text/javascript” src=”‘ );
if( document.location.toString().indexOf( ‘https://’ ) != -1 ) {
document.write( ‘https://ssl’ ); } else { document.write( ‘http://www’ ); }
document.write( ‘.google-analytics.com/urchin.js”></scr’+’ipt>’ );
</script>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
_uacct = “UA-XXXXXXX-X”;
urchinTracker();
</script>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
document.write( ‘<scr’+’ipt type=”text/javascript”>’ );
if( document.referrer.toString().indexOf( ‘www.westerfunk.net’ ) ==-1 ) {
document.write( ‘urchinTracker(document.referrer);’ ); }
document.write( ‘</scr’+’ipt>’ );
</script>

I have set this up on Westerfunk.net and will see what the results look like tomorrow, to see if the code is actually rendering properly. So far it appears it is actually making the calls out to google on every page hit, but only G-analytics results will shed light on this theory.

Blog entry where the code came from:

(Original): http://www.reubenyau.com/google-analyti … rrer-only/
(Archived): http://www.westerfunk.net/archives/tech … er%20Only/

Update:
————————————————————-

This appears to be working very well and all my stats look back to normal on google-analytics. So this code is good …

Well after coming across some issues with the last version of code (i.e. when visiting the website, it wasn’t always rendering the google analytics javascript like it should have been, as reflected in the reports on google’s site). For the past two days, it only showed two hits. So I have now reverted back to my original if/else js code. I guess maybe it was getting cached or not finishing on some browsers or something. Strange …

Thanks to the help of a friend named Matt Hinze, this javascript code can be simplified. Here’s the code:

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>

var url = window.location.protocol == ‘https:’ ? ‘https://ssl.google-analytics.com/urchin.js’ : ‘http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js’;
document.write(‘<scr’+’ipt src=”‘ + url + ‘” type=”text/javascript”>’);
document.write(‘<scr’+’ipt src=”/google.js” type=”text/javascript”>’);

</script>

This is really cool. I modified this to make it possible to differentiate HTTP/S protocols. If you are running a web site where you have both secure (HTTPS) and unsecured (HTTP) information, but want certain data to only show up on the secure pages, this will do it. On the clients’ machine, when downloading the html from the web server, this javascript will detect what protocol is being utilized (either regular HTTP or HTTPS) and render the code accordingly. I modified the code for my Google Analytics tags so that when using HTTPS it will utilize https://ssl.google-analytics.com/urchin.js for secure connections instead of http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js for the unsecured connections. I’ll show you my example code:

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/JavaScript”>
if (window.location.protocol.indexOf(‘https:’)==0?’s’:”)
{
document.write(‘<scr’+’ipt src=”https://ssl.google-analytics.com/urchin.js” type=”text/javascript”>’);
document.write(‘<scr’+’ipt src=”/google.js” type=”text/javascript”>’);
}

else
{
document.write(‘<scr’+’ipt src=”http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js” type=”text/javascript”>’);
document.write(‘<scr’+’ipt src=”/google.js” type=”text/javascript”>’);
}
</script>