American Museum of Natural History

If you have a Google Analytics property, you’ve probably heard about the upcoming switch to GA4. You might have seen the banners across the top of the page when you log into UA. “Universal Analytics will no longer process new data in standard properties beginning July 1, 2023”, a polite yet vaguely threatening notification, easily ignored as a problem for next year. If you are proactive, you might have already started the switch to the new platform, having heard the recommendation to run both concurrently until the switch. And if you are like many, that might be as far as you’ve gotten.

Specialty presses have specific requirements that aren’t met by run-of-the-mill websites or standard e-commerce solutions. Their readers are among the most demanding consumers you’ll find online, and they want precise details about your publications, trustworthy reviews, and recommendations from a community of like-minded readers.

A retail shopping cart e-commerce system isn’t up to the standard these customers expect.

This is part of the reason why Mugo built ReaderBound, an all-in-one, a feature-rich website platform for publishers. The specific demands of this industry require an integrated, purpose-built commerce experience.

Libraries provide a myriad of services for their patrons, which requires a lot of coordination and communication. Patrons need multiple ways to interact with their librarians; in-person, via phone, social media, chat, etc. A modern library needs tools to quickly collect information and requests with an intuitive workflow for staff and the public.

When things go seriously wrong in a well-built but complicated system, the cause is often a cascade of small failures that pile up. Not that we’re building rockets over here, but an excellent example is the ill-fated Ariane flight V88. Solving the issues behind such failures can be problematic. Many things contribute to the difficulty, from the extensive use of caching to the need to convincingly reconstruct the failure in retrospect. Debugging this kind of failure, especially under pressure, is hard. We consider the ability to do this to be the hallmark of a senior developer. Even so, it is essential to have a team of experts working together to troubleshoot issues and find solutions promptly to help keep your site running.

If you manage one of the millions of websites affected by the Google-mandated migration from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you might be following the best practice of simultaneously running UA and GA4 scripts until you’re ready to adopt GA4 fully. One of the analytics features that needs special attention is cross-domain tracking.

A great deal is only “great” if it ends up paying off in the long run.

This truth is perhaps best expressed by author Terry Pratchett in his “Boots theory” of economic value, as laid out in his iconic Discworld novel series:

The Toxics Use Research Institute (TURI) at the University of Massachusetts Lowell wanted to add memos to records in its Pollution Prevention Options Analysis System (P2OASys), a database for evaluating and comparing the safety of chemistries. TURI could have elected to simply add a field to its database structure, but it saw a bigger opportunity to reinvent a key system that had not been updated for more than five years.