a triumph for slothful indolence and lethargy
Like most newly born WordPress.com bloggers, I keenly played with all the features and tirelessly experimented with the rich variety of horrendous 1, 2 and 3 column themes.
Then, I left home and bought a domain name from a geezer in the pub. The downward spiral continues into self-hosting and mixing with the wrong crowd. Inevitably, I stayed up late, dabbled in alcohol and drugs while installing every single plugin and widget ever created for WordPress.
You start taking ProPlus, pulling all-nighters and, unbelievably, start hacking PHP code.
Then, I grew up and became a man. I bought some slippers from M&S together with a pipe and grumbled away at the television ('You can't even hear what they are singing').
The stunning Barthelme theme was left unaltered. The platform was stable but you quickly run out of ready-made, cheap blogging material. Apart from a brief dalliance with pMetrics, Google Analytics silently continues to accumulate data, statistics, lies and damned statistics. You start to sleep in the afternoons and go to bed after the News.
Even the recent announcement of a WordPress statistics plugin for self-hosted blogs couldn't rouse me from my blissful slumber. Why bother with all that pesky download, upload, configuration and activation nonsense wasting valuable time and effort when Google Analytics will probably be revamped with colourful dashboards and a usable interface tomorrow ? And so it came pass. Yet another triumph for apathy.
Life was good. And then Scott Wallick had to spoil it by announcing a major overhaul of all his brilliant WordPress themes including V3.0 of the Barthelme theme. As the current version is an embryonic 1.2.2, you can't resist this temptation. After months of inactivity, you now simply have to act.
So you reluctantly risk RSI by typing on a keyboard again. You have to endure the tortuous download, upload and configuration process. Then you have to use the left side of your tiny brain to merge your changes only to discover that the blog looks exactly the same and only a CSS purist could tell the difference.
Everything that is apart from the 'Related Posts' widget which is now completely broken. You hesitate and consider conducting an exhaustive (and exhausting) search for a WordPress alternative that is compatible with Barthelme 3.0.
Then inertia holds sway, so you give up and reinstate the perfectly functional (if outdated and unfashionable) stunning Barthelme 1.2.2 and slump back in your chair.
resurrection of Performancing Metrics
Just 10 weeks after closing, Performancing Metrics has risen again, phoenix-like, from the ashes.
I didn't use the previous incarnation of this statistics package as I had a hosted WordPress blog which didn't support Javascript. When I migrated to my own WordPress blog, I used Google Analytics which is perfect for my purposes (and free) but I couldn't resist installing the new version of the new statistics package from Performancing Metrics.
The software was really easy to install (two lines of Javascript) in the footer template. I really liked the real-time updates (better than Google Analytics which has a 3 hour lag) which are pretty addictive.
The reporting interface is really smooth and polished (the icons look similar to Netvibes but I presume these are in the public domain).
I was expecting high demand as people rushed to download the new software on day one and sluggish performance. All the reports were very quick and the system was responsive although with my data volumes maybe that isn't so surprising.
In addition to the standard tracking metrics (country, browser, platform, referrer, search terms), Performancing Metrics also allows you to analyse the page views, outbound links and path of an individual visitor which is a nice feature.
The geographic distribution report is integrated with Google Maps which is a nice feature.
Google Analytics is a completely free service (loss leader) but as Performancing Metrics only charges for over 1,000 page views per day, this equates to the same thing for my humble blog.
The WordPress plugin for Google Analytics automatically filters all accesses from WordPress Administration screens. This is better than IP filtering as I might use 3 different computers to manage my blog. This would be a neat feature for a future release of Performancing Metrics.
rolling upgrade
Until 30 minutes ago, this blog was running Wordpress 2.1 courtesy of the Fantastico installation at Bluehost. The blog was fairly stable and worked fine. However, I was investigating upgrading to WordPress 2.1.2 to plug a security issue. The Fantastico Installer currently only offers an upgrade to the flawed 2.1.1 release. In any case, the Fantastico installer now refuses to upgrade my WordPress installation because I have installed new themes, configured additional plug-ins and even added database tables to the schema. So without any prior planning or forethought, I have been forced (by that nagging voice in my head) to spontaneously install a brand new instance of WordPress 2.1.2 and migrate my existing blog. Consequently, this blog will be completely broken for the foreseeable future. All comments will be lost. RSS feeds will stop refreshing. Most plug-ins will stop working. Any hosted images will return '404 - Not Found'. In fact, with my level of knowledge and incompetence, it is likely that the complete blog will be lost forever. Worse, my proudest invention, the rotating tagline, doesn't work. This is completely unintentional but at least, it means my tiny brain can easily differentiate between the 'old' and 'new' blogs. At last, I am now freed from the constraints of Fantastico and as The Clash memorably sang, I now assume 'Complete Control'.how to display Google shared items on WordPress
This post put me in a quandry. I found the video very amusing so I was torn between leaving a grateful comment on Donncha's blog and awarding the article a (Gold) 'Star' in Google Reader. But if I only did that, my friend and a couple of (ex-) colleagues who might appreciate the joke may miss it. That would be very selfish. Forgive me Father, but briefly, I toyed with reverting to Web 0.1 (beta) and sending an mass email to 'Friends/Ex Colleagues'. I compromised by posting an article on my blog referring to Donncha's article so he sees the pingback and gets the credit for spotting the video. So Donncha's happy, I'm happy, everyone's happy. Well - not exactly because I had to write some additional words on my article to justify its existence. This is exactly the situation that Google Shared Items is for.These items might be interesting or useful snippets of information quickly noted in passing which I wouldn't necessarily blog about.I just want to display a RSS feed on my blog for articles like this that I find interesting, amusing or thought provoking. This is trivial to implement in WordPress so I simply grab the feed URL for 'Shared Items' from Google Reader and create an RSS widget to display 'What I am currently reading' on the sidebar in this blog. Unfortunately, that didn't work. The feed and article names were displayed but the formatting of the links was broken on WordPress 2.1. Curiously, I tried the same configuration on a test blog on hosted Wordpress and it worked fine. A little research revealed that the WordPress RSS widget does not appear to support Atom 1.0 format (which is precisely the format used by Google Shared Items). No problem. Just create a Feedburner feed and see if that works. This should automatically, dynamically and intelligently convert the feed format into a format the recipient can digest. Unfortunately, it doesn't. Sigh. Give up in disgust and make a note to ask in the WordPress/Reader forums. Only you can't give up. You want this to work and this is now a challenge. Read the Feedburner FAQ which implies that SmartBurner is what you need. This automatically, converts the original feed format for the consumer on the fly. However, SmartBurner is enabled by default so I wonder why it isn't working. Examine the configuration of SmartBurner. By default, the output feed preserves the format of the original feed (Atom 1.0 in this case). However, it is easy to force conversion to different format (RSS 2.0) by setting the 'Content-Type'. Revisit the WordPress RSS widget. Success ! So, after all that time and effort, I sincerely hope you both enjoy my 'Gooogle Shared Items' feed.
Snap made me finally snap
Thankfully, Scoble has finally found the 'Disable Snap' button on his WP dashboard. Only another 641,000 WordPress blogs to go. If you don't know what I am talking about, just explore Jonathan Lewis' excellent Wordpress blog and see how long you last before exploding. [Hint: hover over a hyperlink] If you can't be bothered, look here although a screenshot can't do justice to the mind numbing effect and irritation factor. Tom Raftery also notes the presence of the dreaded Snap preview and asks for opinions. In fact, this post started out as a comment on Tom's blog but I think this now merits a full-blown rant.Hi Tom I dislike those Snap previews immensely. In fact, I absolutely hate, despise and loathe them with a vengeance. WordPress.com added Snap functionality for all users (default=TRUE). To be fair, following lots of user feedback (surprisingly not all of it positive), WordPress made Snap a configurable option so users could disable the damned distracting Adware popups. Judging by the number of WP blogs still displaying them, it appears the default is still enabled. I think WordPress and Snap are great friends in the Web 2.0 sense but no disclosure about money changing hands was ever made. I would pay WordPress good money to disable Snap. Permanently. Maybe a new business model presents itself. Andy