MJWall.com

I do almost all my development using vim/gvim. Vim is great. Yes, I have tried IDEs, and will use Eclipse when doing some java work. Ever since I started developing in Rails though, it has been me and vim.

I see lots of posts with rails code. Many of them are from Textmate, a Mac text editor, and the VibrantInk color scheme looks great. I already use rails.vim which is a great plugin by Tim Pope for rails development. He has also released a color scheme based on VibrantInk called vividchalk. There is another VibrantInk port for vim oddly enough called vibrantink.vim. Both are really good, but I use the vibrantink.vim color scheme getter for couple of reasons. One, it looks better in console vim. Two, the italics in vividchalk through me off.

Here is a screenshot from flicker with a comparison of the 3 made by Jo Vermeulen, the guy who made vibrantink.vim

Now that I have used typo for a couple of days now, I realized it is missing page stats. Maybe it is vanity, but if I am going to spend time posting information, I want to know when someone is looking at it. So I looked on the mailing list and didn’t see anything current that would help. My first thought, right on, now I have a chance to write my first open source plugin. Then I came to my senses and decided to google around.

I found a post on Juixe TechKnow about a plugin from Graeme. Looked pretty good and I have been wanting to try google analytics. I also found this plugin which appears to be an updated version of Graeme’s. I tried the blue egg edition, but was getting errors about a missing Liquid constant. Didn’t feel like adding liquid so I went back to the first plugin.

Install and configuration was simple. Signed up for google analytics, installed the plugin, modified my environment.rb. Now I am collecting stats.

I did run see this discussion on the mailing list about gathering stats from feeds. I have already signed up for feedburner and replaced the syndication sidebar with a static one.

Should I be concerned? Everything has been too straightforward.

The only issue I see is that the plugin uses the older version of google analytics tracking, urchin.js. Last month, google launched a new script, ga.js. See here for more info. Maybe I’ll update the plugin. I also want to check to see if typo is caching the javascript file or downloading it every time.

BTW, Happy New Year.