MJWall.com

Alright, I give. Rails on shared hosting really sucks. I’ve seen reports of success with Phusion Passenger, but my host doesn’t support it yet. I wrote about my some of this issues I have had. So welcome to wordpress. Same theme, mostly, with less crashes. Maybe this will encourage me to write more.

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.

Well, nothing like waiting until the last minute. My personal weblog has been down for over a year. One of my 2007 new year resolutions was get it back up. Here goes.

Over the past year or so, I have been doing mostly Ruby on Rails work, both personally and professionally. I had to find another job about 3 months ago, and I was dreading having to go back to Java. RoR is just so much fun. I wanted to set my new weblog with RoR and looked at both Typo and Mephisto as well as few others. Why did I choose Typo? I think it was after listening to Stuart Halloway’s podcast. So far so good. I have to say, I am surprised by how easy it was to get set up and going. Much different than my experience with drupal 6 years ago. Surely I know more now, but I am still surprised. I’ll post more info about the set in the about page

I plan to blog mostly about technology, things I find interesting and things I learn. Maybe someone will find it useful.

Thanks for stopping by.