Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

So, the other day we spent a fun couple of hours optimizing livethesheendream.com so it could keep people supplied with Charlie Sheen quotations without turning the server into a charred lump. It's always fun to work on something new, and afterwards we started keeping an eye out for other sites doing similar things. Maybe we'd learn something, or just be entertained with a few odd quotations. So when the Winnipeg Free Press posted a link to livethebettmandream.com we all took a look. It was very familiar. Very, very, familiar.

Now, this was just a simple bit of help on our part for Jarrett Moffatt, so I don't really care if I see that code again elsewhere on a different site. That's Jarrett's business. I haven't even checked if Jarrett was responsible for this site as well. I suspect not, since the Bettman version always loads up with "We always had confidence in the game and our fans.", so it's not using the server-side randomization that the Sheen version has. More telling, however, is what we see when we take a look at the source code. Specifically at the Google Analytics javascript. That should be different, since Google generates different access codes for different sites. But it's not.

Playing internet CSI is fun, but I'd rather this other site used it's own analytics code so the data collected for livethesheendream.com would only include visits to that site. If whoever put that site up is reading this: please get your own Google Analytics. You're polluting the data for the site you copied. (Oh, and right now most of your traffic is coming from the Winnipeg Free Press.)

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