Today Google is rolling out AIM chat inside Gmail, a great new feature and another reason to use their great service. Here is a quote from the Official Gmail Blog:

From the beginning, Google has been committed to open standards and interoperation for instant messaging. So when our friends at AOL agreed to let Gmail users talk to users on their network, we jumped at the chance.

Today we are happy to tell you about a new feature we've started to roll out which will enable you to sign into your AIM account and chat with your AIM buddies right inside Gmail. When you log in to AIM through Gmail chat, your AOL buddies will appear in your chat list with friends from your Google Talk network, and you will see the yellow "running man" logo to the right of your AIM friends' screen names. To your AIM friends it will look like you are logged in to AIM as usual.

Packt Publishing recently announces a new book, Drupal 5 Themes by Ric Shreves. A description from the publisher:

This book is the ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 5. If you want to create a striking new look for your Drupal website, this book is for you. Starting from the basics of theme setup and configuration, you will learn about the Drupal theming architecture and the PHPTemplate engine, and then move on to modifying existing themes and building new themes from scratch. Included is a complete guide to the various style sheets and themeable functions in Drupal 5, making this book a valuable resource even to experienced theme developers.

Amazon who perfected it's use of tabbed navigation scheme for more than a decade, spending hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars in research and design, removed them in the latest redesign.

Recently YouTube updated their player removed next button and made it look cleaner. Options for sharing, flagging become more visible too. This update is not site wide yet and I am sure it will feature other things beside player updates.

Google Analytics is a great way to track your visitor stats. However for those of us that want to track more specific events it seemed like we were out of luck. Have you ever wished that you can track a particular download, maybe you use a lot of flash and want to track specific events inside your flash movies, what if you wanted to track a specific ajax call. All of those things can help you understand your visitors, and the way they use your site.

You will be surprised that Google does offer such tools and they are included in that priceless package you get when you sign up. Google provides us with a Javascript function urchinTracker. This function takes a string and will use it as the title of the page in your reports. Isn't that great? Now you can track whatever event you wish.

Here are some examples of how you would use it:

Lets say you want to track a link click from a flash movie. You would use something like this:

getURL("javascript:urchinTracker('Put something here to describe the event to google.');");

If you want to track a regular link click you can add this line to your html:

onclick="urchinTracker('Put something here to describe the event to google.'); return true;"

Hope this helps you track your visitors better.