Getting to know you! How analytics lets me know who you are.

I am sure lots of people use google analytics on their site to track usage. Its very good for conversion funnels and what have you but it doesn't really have the immediate effect of reporting that I like for blog posts. I have to admit, I am a nosey bugger. I want to know when people are coming to my blog and what they are looking at. I want to know WHO is on my site, I know you dont mind, of course, its only me knowing this stuff right.... right? So, I have been using a service called reInvorate for a long while. It was beta, closed down, become beta again. It has a great feature of showing you who is on your site at the present moment, which is fine if you like knowing that everyone is called "X88893-333-5555"... but if you are using Ray "The Jedi" Camden's BlogCFC, people can ask for the website to remember their details. Now on a tangent, ReInvigorate have released a little tool for Windows and Mac called Snoop which simply displays people coming onto your site. The problem is that they are still pretty anonymous, but I checked something out over at the ReInvigorate site about adding names to these sessions And it turns out that its pretty easy to do it in BlogCFC, you just have to add the following code before the call to ReInvigorate: <cfif isDefined("cookie.blog_name")>
var re_name_tag = "#blog_name#";
</cfif>
<cfif isDefined("cookie.blog_email")>
var re_context_tag="mailto:#cookie.blog_email#";
</cfif>
re_("your_reInvigorate_id"); And then you can finally see who is coming to your site. Nice to see you again too! :)

8 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 4:19 PM - Categories: webdev | coldspring | blogging

Comments not working

Just thought I would say that comments seem to not be working on my blog at the moment. I am heading out of the office, but I shall try and fix it tonight.

3 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 6:54 PM - Categories: personal | blogging

Blogging from TextMate to BlogCFC

Blogging is great, but the problem as many people that travel with laptops know is that you tend to write your blog post in a text document, save it to your desktop (or wherever) and then when you are online you can then open it, copy and paste it, paste the title etc etc into your own blog. You can do that or use one of the many applications that are just for blogging. I am kind of old school, I like tools that can do more than one job (e.g. Eclipse being a great example). My current text editor of choice is TextMate, not free but its very handy and you can open things straight from the command line, open whole directories (like a project) and as Ben Forta mentioned recently there is even a bundle (the way you add extensions) for ColdFusion. What has this got to do with blogging then? Well, I discovered today that I can post any text to different blogs, go and get an item, edit it and post it back. This is really handy since I nearly always have it open. To set it up check under the Bundles-> Blogging -> Setup Blogs and you can put the name and address of your BlogCFC instance with your username at the front, and the directory of the xmlrpc.cfm file (I am using BlogCFC version 5.5.002 ) as follows: MyBLOGCFC      http://yourUsername@www.myblog.com/xmlrpc/xmlrpc.cfm Once you have done that, you need to create a new file from template -> Blogging -> Blog Post (HTML) and it will give you a template with "Title:" already entered, you can then type "blog" and press Tab and it will give you either the default blog you have put in there or a list of them (I have a couple, dev and live so it gives me a choice of two). you can then type "cat" and tab and it will also give you a list of all the categories in your blog, select one and you are away. At the moment there seem to be a few bugs with working with BlogCFC though, that I shall experiment to see if I can find a fix, one of them is that when I post it, it doesn't actually make the blog post live (without re-initing your app) and also the Category doesn't seem to go through and you have to re-enter it in the BlogCFC admin. I have also noticed a number of errors being reported from BlogCFC (unrelated to posting with TextMate) to do with categories which I should look into. Just another great thing you can do with TextMate, apart from coding Ruby on Rails of course. UPDATE: I just checked and there is a screencast on how to do this over at the TextMate site, you can check it out here: http://macromates.com/screencast/blogging_take_two.mov

6 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 3:27 PM - Categories: blogging

Blog: Renamed, Restyled, Reloaded

I decided to change the style of this blog, having a black background is so 90's hence the new design. Its a new install of BlogCFC and I might be moving hosts soon, but I thought I would do a little winter restyling. What do you think? Oh, if you spot something broken, let me know! I shall be adding all the usual things (ask MD etc) as time goes on.

16 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 3:17 PM - Categories: personal | blogging

Wishlist thanks!

I wanted to thank Richard Thibault for sending me a couple of awesome CD's from my Wish List. Erpland and Pungent Effulgent/Strangitude by the Ozric Tentacles are some of the best albums I heard in my young life. They changed my attitude when I was in my teens and lead to me having more incence and metal balls (with bells in them) that was probably healthy for me. I followed this band round a lot and saw them more times than I want to count, not including the number of times I bumped into them at festivals. So, as a lot of people would have "Led Zeppelin IV" as the album that really impacted them, for me it was Pungent Effulgent. So, Richard, a big thanks!!!

4 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 9:40 AM - Categories: cfeclipse | personal | blogging

Stopping Spam with AKistmet

Brandon Harper over at devnulled has released CFAkismet, a CFC that you can integrate into your own blog to stop comment spam. I havent integrated it yet into this blog but judging by the recent trend in comment spamming and subscription spamming it sounds like it would be something very useful to integrate into blogCFC or any CF based blog software. An explenation of what CFAkistmet does from Brandon's CFAKismet page :

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again. How does it work? When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.

I shall try and integrate it and let you know the results!

0 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 10:13 AM - Categories: coldfusion | blogging

Meeboo Chat on my Blog

Having to connect to various IM networks can be annoying, especially if you have friends that will only use X client. So , I downloaded the new MSN Live Messenger and it didnt work. I couldnt connect. I got annoyed, and then Jared told me about meebo.com which is a great way to just connect to all my accounts AND it just runs in the browser (which is cool for me, means I dont have to have unnecessary programs open). They just added the feature to add a chat pod on your own site, which I have done under the "Chat to MD" pod, this is a real neat feature (I know there have been a number of clients out there that do it) but its just a nice little Flash app. So if you do fancy a quick chat, just type your name and send me a message! EDIT: just remember that it might take me a couple of minutes to respond! The browser window that meebo runs in doesnt pop up for me... so it might take me a few seconds at least to notice you have sent me a message!

6 comments - Posted by Mark Drew at 8:34 AM - Categories: personal | blogging