Excluding your own visits from Analytics reports
It is easy to exclude your own visits to your Analytics-tracked site when you have a static IP -- you can just filter out all requests from there. It becomes a bit less straight forward when you have a dynamic IP, or on a large network that maps to a single public IP or IP block (say, at work).
It turns out you can use some built-in Urchin functionality to set a cookie on your browser, which you can then use to filter out your own visits. Google also has some help with this, but the former link is much clearer and more complete.
Because I did not want to setup a specific page to do this (as suggested in the article), I just use FireBug to execute the following JavaScript in the context of my site, which will set a cookie that expires in 20 years or so:
__utmSetVar("no_report");, where
"no_report" is the pattern you are filtering by in Analytics.
This was originally posted to my previous blog. You can view the original post and any comments here.