jkent

In the late 90s, I started a cloud-type hosting provider, with an angel round $100k+, dropping out of university. The dotcom crash happened and raising more money became near impossible. I was inexperienced and tried to do everything myself, and hired the wrong people.

I morphed it in to a web development business that did OK, then worked out it was easier working for someone else (got my life-work balance better) - in a VC-backed startup that ultimately got acquired.

I left to finish my degree. Got confused for a year and did a bit of sales. Then another startup that I couldn't get off the ground (services marketplace) - perhaps insanely ambitious.

Then I trained as a teacher (forgot that), teaching inner city kids how to add up.

I now work at Google in partnerships, where I am largely happy, married, get to travel a lot - and occasionally still 'get the itch' ...

Good question. Google Tag Manager is about improving marketing and tracking tag/pixel performance. These scripts shouldn't do document.write too much.

We don't recommend putting tags in Google Tag Manager that manipulate on-screen elements due to the asynchronous behaviour.

Hi,

I think that for complex sites you have a good point on letting anyone publish tags. Fortunately, it's possible to allow users just to view and edit tags - and not publish them. This leaves the testing and publishing to IT - our testing interface is pretty good - perhaps you could test it :)

The speed up is really around asynchronous firing of tags and for that it may not matter where code is hosted. This should help in situations with either synchronous or poorly designed code (in some situations it may not lead to a measurable improvement).

You've got a good point - we've got more work to do explaining this topic. Thanks for the feedback!

Under the Google Tag Manager Terms of Service, the account holder owns the data. We don't do anything with that data without your consent and Google Tag Manager collects very little data itself - it's cookie-less. I hope that helps!

It's a fair concern - we recommend using just Google Tag Manager (synchronous and lightweight) code to fire all your other tags asynchronously. So in most cases, where you call more than one remote code snippet, it could speed it up.

I think the initial implementation can be tricky (we'd recommend a Google Analytics Certified Partner to help), though once that is done, our initial experience is that adding tags is not too difficult.

We can help with updating tags (please reach out to your Account Manager), or please reach out to me in my profile.

Hi

I manage this product here at Google (for the USA).

We think that it should speed up site loading (in most cases) by asynchronously wrapping your other synchronous and asynchronous JavaScript tags.

We've included built in templates for our own tags at first though we will be introducing easier support for third-party tags soon (templating). At the moment you can do this by adding custom img or Javascript tags in the interface.

This product has most impact where you want to add/remove multiple affiliate tracking or remarketing tags (for instance), across your whole site quickly and easily.

Hope that helps.

A great idea - though this may be confusing, potentially vs. YCombinator?

Perhaps consider a different name - socialisingStartups.com ?

Also good, but the last line doesn't work (in my opinion): to get from 0x1 to 1 you need to undo the x0, i.e. dividing by 0. Which is undefined ... Zero, confusing 10 year olds for centuries!

I successfully managed to explain 3^0 to 10 year olds (as a recovering high school math teacher) as:

  3^2 = 9
  3^1 = 3  (divide 9 by 3)
  3^0 = 1  (divide 3 by 3)
  3^-1 = 1/3  (divide 1 by 3)
  etc

This can logically be explained as n^0=1 for all real numbers.

Unfortunately this doesn't really handle 0^0 but fortunately 10 year olds are rarely that difficult.

Appears down from the UK at around 11pm BST Sunday, unfortunately!

I always recommend 'other' and 'none' options for practically all HN polls.

Not everyone is employed. Some people have unusual relationships (internships?).

Great idea, some questions...

Can we have a vote on this?

How will this be enforced?

What's PG's take on this?