Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
Whether this is intended or not, you can put a pre-existing article to the top of your website’s Atom or RSS feed by saving it as draft while it is being modified before restoring its status to live again. This is handy when you have got permanent articles that you are enhancing over the course of time and you want to give your visitors a reason to return and maybe even prompt search engines too. New articles will achieve this always but it’s nice to see that older articles don’t get lost in space either. This may be a hack but I am using Textpattern for permanent postings rather than blogging and am very happy to see the availability of the feature.
This is an error that I have started to see a lot in the last few weeks. First, it was with Piwik and latterly with WordPress.com Stats. For the record, I have never seen it on up to date systems but always with IE6 and at page unloading time. The CPU usage hits 100% before the error is produced and that has had me blaming JavaScript in error; it isn’t the cause of all ills. In fact, the cause seems to be a bug in a certain release of Adobe Flash 9 but I am of the opinion that the inclusion of certain features in a Flash movie are needed to trigger it too. I don’t have the exact details of this but WordPress.com Stats worked without fault until a recent update and that is what is making me reach the conclusion that I have. That observation is making me wonder whether we are coming to a point where Flash compatibility is something that needs to factored into the use of the said technology in a website or web application. Updating Flash will solve the problem on the client but it might be better if it wasn’t triggered on the server side either.
It amazes me now to think how little tracking I used to do on my various web “experiments” only a few short years ago. However, there was a time when a mere web counter, perhaps displayed on web pages themselves, was enough to yield some level of satisfaction, or dissatisfaction in many a case. Things have come a long way since then and we now seem to have analytics packages all around us. In fact, we don’t even have to dig into our pockets to get our hands on the means to peruse this sort of information either.
At this point, I need to admit that I am known to make use of a few simultaneously but thoughts about reducing their number are coming to mind but there’ll be more on that later. Given that this site is hosted using WordPress software, it should come as no surprise that Automattic’s own plugin has been set into action to see how things are going. The main focus is on the total number of visits by day, week and month with a breakdown showing what pages are doing well as well as an indication of how people came to the site and what links they followed while there. Don’t go expecting details of your visitors like the software that they are using and the country where they are accessing the site with this minimalist option and satisfaction should head your way.
There is next to no way of discussing the subject of website analytics without mentioning Google’s comprehensive offering in the area. You have to admit that it’s comprehensive with perhaps the only bugbear being the lack of live tracking. That need has been addressed very effectively by Woopra, even if its WordPress plugin will not work with IE6. Otherwise, you need the desktop application (being written in Java, it’s a cross-platform affair and I have had it going in both Windows and Linux) but that works well too. Apart maybe from the lack of campaigns, Woopra supplies as good as all of the information that its main competitor provides. It certainly doe what I would need from it.
However, while they can be free as in beer, there are a some costs associated with using using external services like Google Analytics and Woopra. Their means of tracking your web pages for you is by executing a piece of JavaScript that needs to be added to every page. If you have everything set to use a common header or footer page, that shouldn’t be too laborious and there are plugins for publishing platforms like WordPress too. This way of working means that if anyone has JavaScript disabled or decides not to enable JavaScript for the requisite hosts while using the NoScript extension with Firefox, then your numbers are scuppered. Saying that, the same concerns probably any JavaScript code that you may want to execute but there’s another cost again: the calls to external websites can, even with the best attention in the world, slow down the loading of your own pages. Not only is additional JavaScript being run but there also is the latency caused by servers having to communicate across the web.
A self-hosted analytics package would avoid the latter and I found one recently through Lifehacker. Amazingly, it has been around for a while and I hadn’t known about it but I can’t say that I was actively looking for it either. Piwik, formerly known as PHPMyVisites, is the name of my discovery and it seems not too immature either. In fact, I’d venture that it does next to everything that Google Analytics does. While I’d prefer that it used PHP, JavaScript is its means of tracking web pages too. Nevertheless, page loading is still faster than with Google Analytics and/or Woopra and Firefox/NoScript users would only have to allow JavaScript for one site too. If you have had experience with installing PHP/MySQL powered publishing platforms like WordPress, Textpattern and such like, then putting Piwik in place is no ordeal. You may find yourself changing folder access but uploading of the required files, the specification of database credentials and adding an administration user is all fairly standard stuff. I have the thing tracking this edifice as well as my outdoor activities (hillwalking/cycling/photography) web presence and I cannot say that I have any complaints so we’ll see how it goes from here.
Here’s a trick that might have its uses: using a local WordPress instance to update your online blog (yes, there are plenty of applications that promise to edit your online blog but these need file permissions to the likes of xmlrpc.php to be opened up). Along with the right database access credentials and the ability to log in remotely, adding the following two lines to wp-config.php does the trick:
define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://localhost/blog');
define('WP_HOME', 'http://localhost/blog');
These two constants override what is in the database and allow to update the online database from your own PC using WordPress running on a local web server (Apache or otherwise). One thing to remember here is that both online and offline directory structures are similar. For example, if your online WordPress files are in blog in the root of the online web server file system (typically htdocs for Linux), then they need to be contained in the same directory in the root of the offline server too. Otherwise, things could get confusing and perhaps messy. Another thing to consider is that you are modifying your online blog so the usual rules about care and attention apply, particularly with respect to using the same version of WordPress both locally and remotely. This is especially a concern if you, like me, run development versions of WordPress to see if there are any upheavals ahead of us like the overhaul that is coming in with WordPress 2.7.
An alternative use of this same trick is to keep a local copy of your online database in case of any problems while using a local WordPress instance to work with it. I used to have to edit the database backup directly (on my main Ubuntu system), first with GEdit but then using a sed command like the following:
sed -e s/www\.onlinewebsite\.com/localhost/g backup.sql > backup_l.sql
The -e switch uses regular expression substitution that follows it to edit the input with the output being directed to a new file. It’s slicker than the interactive GEdit route but has been made redundant by defining constants for a local WordPress installation as described above.
CSS positioning seems to be becoming a nightmare when it comes to IE6 support. While I am aware that the likes of 37signals have stopped making their products work with it, there remain a lot of people who stick or are stuck with the old retainer. I am one of the latter because of the continued use of Windows 2000 at my place of work, though a Windows Vista roll-out has been mooted for a while now. If nothing else, it keeps me in the loop for any inconsistencies that afflict the display of my websites. Positioning of an element within the browser window rather than within its parent element is one of these and it looks as if specifying a position of relative in a stylesheet is part of this. Apparently, it could be down to its non-triggering of IE’s haslayout property. It might be a hack but I have found that static positioning has helped. I’ll continue to keep my eye out for a better solution if it exists but the static option seems to have no detrimental effect in IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome or Opera.
Here’s a piece of Linux/UNIX shell scripting code that will do a recursive FTP refresh of a website for you:
lftp <<~/Tmp/log_file.tmp 2>>~/Tmp/log_file.tmp
open ${HOSTNAME}
user ${USER} ${PSSWD}
mirror -R -vvv “${REP_SRC}” “${REP_DEST}”
EndFTP
When my normal FTP scripting approach left me with a broken WordPress installation and an invalid ticket in the project’s TRAC system that I had to close, I turned to looking for a more robust way of achieving the website updates and that’s what led me to seek out the options available for FTP transfers that explicitly involve directory recursion. The key pieces in the code above are the use of lftp in place of ftp, my more usual tool for the job, and the invocation of the mirror command that comes with lftp. The -R switch ensures that file transfer is from local to remote (vice versa is the default) and -vvv turns on maximum verbosity, a very useful thing when you find that it takes longer than more usual means. It’s all much slicker than writing your own script to do the back-work of ploughing through the directory structure and ensuring that the recursive transfers take place. Saying that, it is possible to have a one line variant of the above but the way that I have set things up might be more familiar to users of ftp.
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.
Today, I caught sight of an article on anti-plagiarism tools at The Blog Herald and among the tricks was to use mod-rewrite to stop people “borrowing” both your images and your bandwidth. The gist is that you set up one or more conditions that exclude websites from the application of a rule forbidding access to images; the logic is that if the website referencing an image is not one of the websites listed in the conditions, then it doesn’t get to display any of your images.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?awebsite.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpe?g|png|bmp)$ [F,NC]
On my other blog, a WordPress one that I have hosted myself, I have added the FireStats plug-in so that I can get some idea how many are paying it a visit. It has definitely been useful. It tells you referrer, operating system and browser information as well as what has been visited. I know that I can look at my server logs to get this information but this is so much easier and it can be extended to non-WordPress PHP-powered pages too.
Hansel and Gretel Breadcrumb is another plug-in that I have spotted but given that the blog is set-up, it didn’t look that useful. If it could be extended to my non-blog pages à la FireStats, that would be a much more useful situation.