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Analyzing My Starbucks Rewards Behavior

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One of the interesting aspects of joining the Starbucks Rewards is not just the program’s perks but taking a look at your coffee-addicted behavior. Okay, so you may not really want to know how many times you’ve visited Starbucks (thankfully, there are no (visible) dollar amounts spent at each visit), but looking at your Rewards History, you can easily chart your visits and stars earned. Here’s what my July 2012 looked like.

I earned 12 Rewards stars during the month and as you can guess, I treat myself to a drink on most Fridays. On July 13, I earned a free drink (every 15 stars at the Gold level).

Doing a real quick analysis on a monthly basis gives me the chart below.

Starting in June 2012, my Starbucks visits (and consumption) went up considerably. I should take a look at blog posts from that month to see what was up. For the on-going 12 Star Dash, I added the orange reference line. Interesting… If I had seen this data before, I wouldn’t have taken the contest so lightly, having met the 12-star goal only three times all in the past three months. To complete the Dash, I need to rack up 12 stars in less than half a month.

Hmmm, time to strategize…

Adding a Subdomain for a CDN

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Since I’ll be doing some housecleaning re-associating images with old posts, I might as well head towards a cookieless domain to act as a self hosted CDN. Here’s what I did in Dreamhost.

  1. Under Manage Domains, I created a subdomain called static.pulpconnection.net. I set the option to remove www from the URL.
  2. I picked a user to run this subdomain.
  3. For the Web Directory field, I mapped it to the location of the WordPress uploads home/username/domain/wp-content/uploads

Hope this is right. Now to test…

Ooops. So that the file directory isn’t displayed if you open static.pulpconnection.net in a browser, I added an index.php file to the location that redirects visitors to pulpconnection.net.