Google Analytics is all very fine with its once a day reporting cycle but the availability of real time data dose have its advantages. WordPress.com’s Stats plugin goes some way to serving the need but Woopra trumps it in every way apart from a possible overkill in the amount of information that it makes available. The software may be in the beta phase and it does crash from time to time but its usefulness remains more than apparent.

One of its uses is seeing if there are people visiting your website at a time when you might be thinking of making a change like upgrading WordPress. Timing such activities to avoid a clash is a win-win situation: a better experience from your visitors and more reliable updates for you. After all, it’s very easy to make a poor impression and an unreliable site will do that faster than anything else so it’s paramount that your visitors do not get on the receiving end of updates, even if they are all for the better.

I must admit that I have never been a great fan of JavaScript. For one thing, its need to interact with browser objects places you at the mercy of the purveyors of such pieces of software. Debugging is another fine art that can seem opaque to the the uninitiated since the amount and quality of the logging is determined an interpreter that isn’t provided by the language’s overseers. All in all, it seems to present a steep and obstacle-strewn learning curve to newcomers. As it happens, I have always found server side scripting languages like PHP and Perl to be more to my taste and I have no aversion at all to writing SQL.

In the late 1990’s when I was still using free web hosting, JavaScript probably was the best option for my then new online photo gallery. Whatever was the truth, it certainly was the way that I went. Learning Java or Flash might have been useful but I never managed to devote sufficient time to the task so JavaScript turned out to be the way forward until I got a taste of server side scripting. Moving to paid hosting allowed for that to develop and the JavaScript option took a back seat.

Based on my experience of the browser wars and working with JavaScript throughout their existence, I was more than a little surprised at the buzz surrounding AJAX. Ploughing part of the way through WROX’s Beginning AJAX did nothing to sell the technology to me; it came across as a very dry jargon-blighted read. Nevertheless, I do see the advantages of web applications being as responsive as their desktop equivalents but AJAX doesn’t always guarantee this; as someone that has seen such applications crawling on IE6, I can certainly vouch for this. In fact, I suspect that may be behind the appearance of technologies such as AIR and Silverlight so JavaScript may get usurped yet again, just like my move to a photo gallery powered on the server side.

Even with these concerns, using JavaScript to add a spot more interactivity is never a bad thing even if it can be overdone, hence the speed problems that I have witnessed. In fact, I have been known to use DOM scripting but I need to have the use in mind before I can experiment with a technology; I cannot do it the other way around. Nevertheless, I am keen to see what JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and Prototype might have to offer (both have been used in WordPress). I have happened on their respective websites so they might make good places to start and who knows where my curiosity might take me?

I have been thinking of sharing my thoughts on using IDE’s such as NetBeans, Eclipse and Komodo Edit from a web developer’s point of view for a while but it has still to come. In the meantime, Java Boutique have shared their thoughts on NetBeans 6.1 and I think that they are well worth a look. In fact, I downloaded a copy for my own use off the back of this. MySQL capabilities look especially intriguing.

An idea recently popped into my head for my hillwalking website: collecting a listing of bus services of use and interest to hillwalkers. Being rural, these services may not get the publicity that they deserve. In addition, they are generally subsidised so any increase in their patronage can only help maintain their survival.

Currently, the list lives on a page in the blog but another thought has come to mind: using WordPress to host the list as a series of log entries, a sort of blog if you like. Effectively, that would involve having two blogs on the same website it can be done. One way is to set up up two instances of WordPress and they could work from the same database; the facility for this is allowed by the ability to use different table prefixes for the different blogs so that there are no collisions. There’s nothing to stop you having two databases but your hosting provider may charge extra for this. This set up will work but there is a  caveat: you now have two blogs to maintain and, with regular WordPress releases, that means an extra overhead. Apart from that, it’s a workable approach.

Another option is to use WordPress MU. That would cut down on the maintenance but there are costs here too. It’s need of virtual hosts is a big one. If my experience is any guide, you probably need a dedicated server to go down this route and they aren’t that cheap. I needed to do a spot of Apache configuration and some editing of my hosts file to get my own installation off the ground; I don’t reckon that would be an option with shared hosting. Once I sorted out the hosts with a something.something.else address, set up was very much quick and easy.

Apart from a tab named Site Admin, the administration dashboard isn’t at all that different from a standard WordPress 2.3.x arrangement. In the extra tab, you can create blogs and users, control blogs and themes as well upgrade everything in a single step. Themes and plugins largely work as usual from an administration point of view. With plugins, you have just to try them and see what happens; one adding FCKEditor threw an error while the editor window was loading but it otherwise worked OK. I had no trouble at all with themes so all looks very well on that front.

Importing and editing posts worked as usual but for two perhaps irritating behaviours: tags are, not unreasonably, removed from titles and inline styled and class declarations are removed from tags in the body of a blog entry. Both could be resolved by post processing in the blog’s theme but the Sniplets plugin allows a better way out for the latter and I have been putting it to good use.

In summary, WordPress MU worked well and looks a very good option for multi-blog sites. However, the need for a dedicated server and the quirks that I have seen when it comes to handling post contents keep me away from using it for production blogs for now. Even so, I’ll be retaining it as a test system anyway. As regards the country bus log, I think that I’ll be sticking with the blog page for the moment.

Movable Type was the leading blogging platform before Six Apart disappointed their users with their licensing and WordPress came into being. Now that WordPress would seem to be king of the hill, it’s tempting to conclude that there’s nothing else out there for those wanting a self-hosted blog. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

These days, Movable Type is available as an open source entity and I have been giving it a quick whirl. Importing from a WordPress export file is very swish and a quick spot of tinkering gets you a running in no time. Getting the thing set up can be a little confusing because the processing is done by CGI scripts and they need to live in your website’s cgi-bin directory while the actual blog is instantiated in another location. Aside from that complexity, things are not that offputting and the style of the administration and content management dashboard could show WordPress a thing or two. It’s partitioning of trackbacks from comments is another useful feature in this world pervaded by comment spam.

Habari is another option that I have encountered and it seems like early days for this one. The first impression that struck me was its minimalist feel but it will do most of what you ask of it when it comes to blogging. Nevertheless, importing and exporting is one area that needs more development and its handling of themes is a matter that warrants more exploration on my part. In summary, it seems to offer most of your needs, even if there is nothing to make it stand out from the crowd at this time.

I encountered another alternative platform in the pages of PC Plus called Expression Engine. It is commercial software but there is a free cut down version available without some of the modules. There is a bit more to the offering than blogging but you have to buy it to get features like wikis, forums and the like. As it happens, the blogging capability in the free version is creditable and it seems that you can manage multiple blogs through the same interface, a feature that has potential when it comes to using the software as a kind of CMS. It cannot directly import from WordPress but a Movable Type export file is accepted without a bother. With regards to changing the look and feel of the blog, I found that editing the index and stylesheet files through the administration interface produced good results quite easily and quickly. Maybe creating a new theme might be a worthwhile project to see how one can make a blog’s appearance fall into line with the other parts of a website. After all, Ellis Labs claim that the software should work the way that you do.

I only have done a quick spot of fiddling with any of the above but there is potential for further investigations to see what else they have to offer. I am sure that there are other alternatives and the CMS Drupal comes to mind for its having a blogging module, even if I didn’t find the main CMS functionality to be sufficiently flexible for my needs when I last tried it (a new version made it appearance recently); overly complex CSS was one bugbear for me. Even with all the possibilities, I won’t be spending too much of my time exploring this area. Suffice it to say, it’s not a completely WordPress world…

I don’t know if this might become a series but a sequel to an earlier post might be a sign of things to come. I was pulling another version of WordPress from Subversion and noted a lot of updated files coming through, more than usual. Curiosity led to my having a look and there have been a few obvious tweaks. The most noticeable of these is that the Plugins portlet was now active, making its role clearer. The role? Apparently, it feeds a random selection of WordPress plugins from those included in WordPress.org’s own listings. It might be useful or an annoying diversion but we’ll see what comes; it is unconfigurable for now. Otherwise, the admin screens look a little sharper, especially to the ones for editing and managing content. I’ll continue to await the arrival of the ability to apply admin screen themes: its a "TODO" on the dashboard screen and could be interesting if it were to come about. We’ll see…

I haven’t mentioned WordPress in a while but it’s now heading for version 2.5 after 2.4 was skipped. Because I want to ensure that upgrading doesn’t cause problems for my blogs, I have been picking up nightly builds with Subversion from WordPress.org. The following is the command to be used and it works fine on my Ubuntu system in the folder where I want the WordPress installation directory to live. If you want to find out more about Subversion, there is a free book on the web.

svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/

The main event is the new dashboard and that seems to be taking cues from Movable Type (I gave that a whirl recently so I may say something here about it yet). Everything is still there along with tantalising hints of prospects for customisation. In the interim, you can change the front page feeds so that they originate from other than the world of WordPress, not a bad thing given that I found WordPress Planet feeds were annoying often. Alternate theme support for the dashboard seems to be on the to do list as is something for plugins; we’ll see what comes of the latter. Otherwise, nothing seems to be changed or, more importantly, broken and I am able to get a mirror of my outdoors blog up and running with the only problems of any note coming from the new web address, not at all major. I’ll continue to tabs on what’s happening and being forewarned of any future problems is a big bonus.

Update: I found a good summary of what to expect on Blog Herald. This is one for a return visit, methinks.

I know what I said about a post every two days but something has entered my head that seems timely. Things seem to starting up for 2008 and my getting a swathe of post ideas is only one of them. Today, Sun has bought up MySQL, the database that stores these ponderings for posterity, and Oracle has finally got its hands on Bea, the people behind the Weblogic software with which I have had an indirect brush for a lot of 2007.

Installing all of the bits and pieces is painless enough so long as you know what’s what; Synaptic does make it thus. Interestingly, Ubuntu’s default installation is a lightweight affair with the addition of any additional components involving downloading the packages from the web. The whole process is all very well integrated and doesn’t make you sweat every time you to install additional software. In fact, it resolves any dependencies for you so that those packages can be put in place too; it lists them, you select them and Synaptic does the rest.

Returning to the job in hand, my shopping list included Apache, Perl, PHP and MySQL, the usual suspects in other words. Perl was already there as it is on many UNIX systems so installing the appropriate Apache module was all that was needed. PHP needed the base installation as well as the additional Apache module. MySQL needed the full treatment too, though its being split up into different pieces confounded things a little for my tired mind. Then, there were the MySQL modules for PHP to be set in place too.

The addition of Apache preceded all of these but I have left it until now to describe its configuration, something that took longer than for the others; the installation itself was as easy as it was for the others. However, what surprised me were the differences in its configuration set up when compared with Windows. Same software, different operating system and they have set up the configuration files differently. I have no idea why they did this and it makes no sense at all to me; we are only talking about text files after all. The first difference is that the main configuration file is called apache2.conf in Ubuntu rather than httpd.conf as in Windows. Like its Windows counterpart, Ubuntu’s Apache does uses subsidiary configuration files. However, there is an additional layer of configurability added courtesy of a standard feature of UNIX operating systems: symbolic links. Rather than having a single folder with the all configuration files stored therein, there are two pairs of folders, one pair for module configuration and another for site settings: mods-available/mods-enabled and sites-available/sites-enabled, respectively. In each pair, there is a folder with all of the files and another containing symbolic links. It is the presence of a symbolic link for a given configuration file in the latter that activates it. I learned all this when trying to get mod_rewrite going and changing the web server folder from the default to somewhere less susceptible to wrecking during a re-installation or, heaven forbid, a destructive system crash. It’s unusual but it does work, even if it takes that little bit longer to get things sorted out when you first meet up with it.

Apart from the Apache set up and finding the right things to install, getting a test web server up and running was a fairly uneventful process. All’s working well now and I’ll be taking things forward from here; making website Perl scripts compatible with their new world will be one of the next things that need to be done.

I had a recent problem with InternetNews.com: its adverts were causing Firefox to lock up my CPU. While I do put my CPU through its paces, I’d rather that others didn’t decide to do the same and with things that do not add a great deal of value. So it was time to set ZoneAlarm loose by cranking up its ad blocking to the max. There are occasions where exceptions are needed and right-clicking on a domain name in the site list in the Privacy area allows you to relax things on a site by site basis. Obviously, you need to know the website well but I don’t ever remember having this sort of control with Norton Personal Firewall when I had it on my main PC.