Since they sit outside of WordPress, how then to use WordPress.com Stats to track visits to them? In this post, I’ll explain what I did to achieve this goal in two simple steps.

I’m pretty much going to re-hash Jeffrey D Allen‘s post on the same subject. His post dealt specifically with tracking visits to the WordPress-generated category pages. I’m looking at tracking static HTML pages (as opposed to WordPress pages).

WordPress.com Stats is a simply plugin which tracks all the info about visitors to that I’m interested in. It’s neither fancy nor comprehensive but what it does, it does well. The simplest explanation of what it does is that each time a visitor hits a page on your site, it runs a piece of javascript code which takes the details of the visit and tallies them with details of other visits. So, the solution to the problem is to add this piece of javascript to each static HTML page outside of WordPress that I wanted to track.

Create a Fake Pages

First, create fake pages within WordPress against which all the stats will be logged. This is a necessary evil. WordPress Stats cannot actually track visits to pages outside of WordPress so we trick it.  Fortunately, in my case, I can bundle all the legacy static HTML pages into half a dozen different categories and track hit on each category rather than on individual pages.

I suggest bundling less important pages into categories in this way and creating individual fake pages for any more important static HTML pages you want to track.

To do this, create a WordPress page and mark it as private. In this way, visitors to your site will never see it. The vital piece of information generated by this is the internal ID number of the page. You can find this by viewing the pages collection in the dashboard. Hover over the page title and the number appears in the status bar as something like ‘?p=921′. Note this down.

Edit the HTML Pages

The second step is the most tedious – editing the HTML pages to add the javascript code. On each page your want to monitor, add this code:

<script src="http://stats.wordpress.com/e-201018.js" type="text/javascript">
<script type="text/javascript">
st_go({blog:'yourBlogID',v:'ext',post: 'yourPageID'});
var load_cmc = function(){linktracker_init(yourBlogID, yourPageid,2);};
if ( typeof addLoadEvent != 'undefined' ) addLoadEvent(load_cmc);
else load_cmc();
</script>

Make sure that you replace yourBlogID with the ID of your blog which can be found by looking at the source code of any page on your blog (view source) and finding the code above at the bottom of the page.

Make sure you replace yourPageID with the ID of the WordPress fake page you created in step one.

That’s it. You are ready to go. Visits a couple of your static HTML pages then check that they appear in the stats.

Note: this code does not appear when you are logged in to your blog so that your visits don’t confuse the stats.

(If you don’t know what RSS is, I reckon it’s time to stop banging rocks together in your cave-lair and drag yourself into the real world.)

The problem with using Google Reader (or any RSS feed reader) is how to arrange your feeds so that you can see the posts which are important to you and gather the rest for reading when you have more time. How do you make sure you read the gems and leave the vase swaths of rubbish until you have time.

As far as I can see there are three basic organisational strategies. You can organise by:

• Subject; eg: fencing, astronomy, technology, comics, etc.
• Priority; eg: must read, read occasionally, read only when I have time, etc
• Type; eg: a blog, a web site update noticiation, a podcast, etc

However, given that most feed readers only allow a single folder structure, should you organise your feeds by subject, you lose the ability to group them by priority or feed type. This is where Google Reader comes into it’s own.

Google Reader, too, has folders but they’re really just glorified tags which means you can assign a feed to multiple folders. Yay. Here’s how I do it.

First, I organise by priority. This is encoded in the _Major, _Minor, _Other and _Lifehacker folders. The priority order is feeds in _Major I must read every day down to those in the _Lifehacker folder (because of the RSS spam it generates) I can simply mark as read if I don’t have time or couldn’t be bothered reading them. The underscore at the start of the folder name is simply to ensure that these folders appear first in the alphabetical list of folders.

Next, I organise by the purpose or type of the RSS feed. These are the folders in brackets ([...]). If I’m lacking time for reading, I can easily mark as read all the feeds which simply notify me of updates to web sites and concentrate on those which give me real content.

Finally, and for me least useful in the everyday, is the categorisation by subject. This is the rest of the folders, some 20 odd more folders. The folder structure seemed incomplete without a subject category but I can’t say I’m ever actually used any of these folders.

Migrating from Geocities

Moving to WordPress, I had to deal with how to redirect people from my Geocities web site. The problem is the GeoCities is not interested in letting me access anything interesting such as an .htaccess file, a server-side 301/302 redirection, etc and did not allow me to post perl or php code to do job. I had to fall  back to javascript to redirect a browser to here. The unwanted side-effect of this is that Geocities would wrap a very annoying frame around the redirected page.

Never fear! The WordPress add_action() function is here! A small bit of javascript hooked into wp_head did the trick. The add_action() function takes a pre-defined function and adds it into the hook specified – meaning that the function is added to the list of stuff to be processed when WordPress is deciding what to include in the HTML <head> tag it sends the browser. Here’s the code in question:

function kill_geocities_frames() {
   echo "<script type='text/javascript'>
      // <![CDATA[
      if (self != top && self.location.host != 'sleech.info' ) {
         top.location.href = self.location.href;
      } else {
         if ( document.getElementById('y_gc_div_adcntr') ) {
            y_gc_div_adcntr.innerHTML = '';
            y_gc_div_mast.innerHTML = '';
            y_gc_div_au1.innerHTML = '';
         }
      }
      // ]]>
   </script>";
}

add_action('wp_head', 'kill_geocities_frames');

Excerpts and Ellipsis

My preference has always been to have the front page of my blog include the full text of the latest post only and excerpts of all other posts. To me, this just looks better. The issue is that the theme I prefer did not support this. The code to do this is better explained pretty much everywhere so I’m not going to dig into the explain here.

The problem that concerns me now is how to make make the excerpt display in the way I want it to. This problem can be broken down into two goals to be achieved:

1. I want the excerpt to show more than just plain text. I want it to show links, images, bold text, etc — all the standard HTML.
2. I want to convert the standard ellipsis [...] at the end of the excerpt to be a clickable link which takes the reader to the full version of the post.

There are numerous plugins which solve one of these problems but none that I’ve found that do both at the same time to the level of quality I want. None of the plugins I tried wanted to play nice together. I chose Advanced Excerpt to solve goal 1 and give me complete control over what HTML is displayed in the excerpt.

To solve goal 2, WordPress again came to the rescue in the form of add_filter(). This is a function through which you pass a bunch of text – such as the text of the excerpt – which is manipulated and changed according to a function you write for the purpose. In this case, I wrote a function which searches the text given it for the HTML ellipsis entity added to the end of the excerpt by the plugin and replaces it with the HTML code for the link I want. Add_filter() then hooks my function into the the_excerpt() template tag. Here’s the code:

function my_excerpt_ellipsis($text) {
   return str_replace('[&hellip;]', '&hellip; <a href="'.
         get_permalink($post->ID) . '" rel="nofollow" class="more">
         read on »</a>', $text);
}

add_filter('the_excerpt', 'my_excerpt_ellipsis');

Man, I love this stuff!

• Dell PowerEdge 2900 III
• Two quad-core Xeon processors
• 16 GB RAM
• Two 300 GB SATA HDDs (not much, I know, but there’s still six empty drive bays to fill)
• Two Gigabit NICs
• VMWare ESX 3.5 installable (yet to be installed)

What the hell do I need a monster like this for?

Since I’ve made the move from working for small to medium business to working for global enter prises such as Rio Tinto (among others), I need to learn and practice and keep up-to-date with enterprise-level tech. The keys to enterprise technologies at the moment and for the foreseeable future centre around ideas of virtualisation, that is, bundling a bunch of computers onto a big-ass server such that each computer is tricked into believing it’s running on its own dedicated hardware. The benefits are that you minimise hardware costs and can take advantage of other enterprise technologies such as clustering, load balancing and failover to ensure high availability of all servers.

That’s the officialese out of the way. What am I going to use my new toy for?

A couple of things:

• Creating a dedicated test environment with automated rebuild ability so that I can train myself in managing and manipulating VMWare guest (ie: virtualised) computers. I can push each virtual test machine until I break it and then rebuild it to the second before it broke almost instantly. No more wasting time reinstalling the OS, apps and configuring the broken machine.
• Stop the need to scrounge for bits. I tend to spened a lot of time begging, borrowing and stealing computer bits to keep a bunch of clapped-out personal computers running so that I can dodgy them about so that I can learn server products. Now I’ll have dedicated hardware with a warranty that will last me a number of years and which can change to meet the needs of the moment.
• If I ever get off my increasingly overweight butt and start producing audio dramas for podcast, I’ll need a grunty computer for audio processing. As far as a server which can be sqqueezed into a home budget and computing environment, they don’t come much gruntier.
• Geeking out over cool tech. This point is self-explanatory.

You may be wondering why I’ve swapped the bucket-o-details form for another registration or authentication method. The answer is that you’ve probably got an OpenID-style account already and don’t know it. If you a an account on any of these web sites, you have an OpenID.

• LiveJournal
• Blogger
• WordPress
• Flickr
• Technorati
• Yahoo

There are others but as you can see from this list, most of the social web is covered.

In any OpenID enabled field on this site, you will see the OpenID logo and a drop-down button. The easiest way to enter your OpenID is to select your OpenID provider from the drop-down and enter your username on that service.

I’ve gotta say that high speed interenet has allowed such a growth of brilliant ideas that simply would not have been possible even five years ago. Open-source has shows it’s worth time and time again both by sponsoring the development and implementation of open standard such as OpenID. While there’s always a place for the corporate comfort and security of proprietary methods and practices, open source gets my vote every time.

Yay.

Since the web site is largely based around recording events in my role playing campaigns over time, this should be the core of the site. My idea is to do this as a blog which allows players and anyone else who reads the campaign to make comments, corrections, etc. Added on to this can be a personal blog (much like this) and a blog covering the various bits of war gaming I do. Of course, there’ll be plenty of photos of figures and stuff I do when I’m out and about town hacking people with swords and the like.

My problem is finding the best way to achieve this goal. Currently I’m looking at blogging software such as WordPress. While the core of it is bog standard blogging, I believe that it also allows me to customise the page for each category (each role playing campaign is a category, war gaming, etc) and add a bunch of static or normal (x)HTML pages for stuff that doesn’t change often such as campaign resources, an about me pages, etc.

Does sound like a reasonable idea? Is anyone likely to comment on campaign event postings? Is WordPress capable of what I believe it can do?

Let your inner geek revel in this advertising video: http://www.nikkoamerica.com/nhe/dvd_projector_video.html.

The guy claims that web standards are impossible because of the mess of browsers which do not implement W3C web standards, implement them inconsistently or add browser-specific tags. He says all this as if Microsoft wasn’t the originator of all these faults with web design today.

Let’s have a quick look at some of his claims:

Those documents are super confusing.
— The Wanker’s Rant

I guess they are confusing if you haven’t learned to read yet or insist on buying shows with Velcro fasteners because those fiddly laces-things are waaaaaay too difficult. Let’s test some of the text of the HTML 4.01 Standard for legibility.

“The BR element forcibly breaks (ends) the current line of text. (http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#h-9.3.2)”

Pretty good so far. How about another?

“In ordered lists, it is not possible to continue list numbering automatically from a previous list or to hide numbering of some list items. However, authors can reset the number of a list item by setting its value attribute. Numbering continues from the new value for subsequent list items. (http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/lists.html#h-10.2)”

Tough isn’t it? All those letters next to each other like that. To read this stuff you may even have to know how to read that joined-up writing grown-ups do.

Oddly enough, the people this loser claims to be the victims of the standards conspiracy, Microsoft, is a member of the W3C Committee which developed the standard. It’s not like web standards are a surprise for them or that they don’t have anyway of asking questions when they don’t understand what’s going on.

In practice, with the web, there’s a bit of a problem: no way to test a web page against the standard, because there’s no reference implementation that guarantees that if it works, all the browsers work. This just doesn’t exist.
— The Wanker’s Rant

Ok. How about the reference browser implementation put out by the W3C committee? It’s called Amaya. It’s not the greatest browser in the world but it’s not meant to be. It’s sole purpose in life is to show you how the people who write the web standards this cockhead complains about should display.

There is no practical way to check if the web page you just coded conforms to the spec. There are validators, but they won’t tell you what the page is supposed to look like, and having a “valid” page where all the text is overlapping and nothing lines up and you can’t see anything is not very useful.
— The Wanker’s Rant

Oh dear. There are plenty of validators which test whether the code for your page conforms to standards. The Amaya browser shows you how it should look on a standard compliant browser.

The fact that there are non-conforming browsers (read lots of versions of Internet Explorer) browsers is not an argument for dropping the ideal of standards but an argument for dropping Internet Explorer for a standards-compliant browser.

Standards make everyone’s life easier by providing a common language for communication and development. The mantra which should be on every web developer’s lips is:

Standards Make Sense