This is not a tag line!
meta-blog
This post courtesy of Quicksilver
Nov 6th
I tried to install 10.3.6 yesterday and for a reason or another, my laptop kernel panic’ed on me during the install. I had to reboot and wasn’t too hopeful that it would even work. Much to my surprise though, I was able to login without issue. Only noticeable problem though, no Finder, no menu bar, just floating icons at the top right of the screen and my empty Dock at the bottom right (I only use the Dock for the trash and to monitor running applications). Since I had Quicksilver installed though (and its icon was showing among the other icon where the menu bar would normally be), I was able to launch Terminal and other apps. I have been able to work with my system without any other issue so far.
It goes without saying that I will re-install. However, without Quicksilver, I wouldn’t have been able to use my laptop in the mean time. It even allowed me to try and re-install from the full updater instead of Software Update (both from the GUI and command line since Installer would get stuck after showing the license). Though it didn’t work, at least, I could try! Thanks, Quicksilver! 
Pardon our dust…
Oct 15th
I’m trying to tweak a plugin that I installed and that is not working correctly so funky things might appear and all hell might break loose for a while. Sorry about that but it’s easier this way…
It seems to be settled now. Enjoy!
Commodore Rock from the album 604 by Ladytron
Zeitgeist – September 2004
Oct 5th
I have installed StatTraq in August. For those who don’t know, Stattraq is a WordPress plugin which allows you to track statistics (hence the name) about who visited your weblog and how they got there. I find it interesting (though relatively vain) to look at the stats. I decided to present a little Metacosm zeitgeist in the spirit of Google’s. If I remember to do it, it’ll be a monthly occurrence.
For September 2004, most visitors arrived to the website through Google (not a huge surprise). The most popular query was “missile balloons” and its variant totalling 131 referrals. Rather surprising considering that my post on this was just a reblog from Engadget. I guess it speaks volume about the power of this particular meme. People also found this weblog while searching for stylesheets for Movable Type and WordPress (38 referrals total from stylesheet-related queries). Quicksilver (30 referrals) was also popular thanks (mostly) to my posting of screenshots, screenshots that I should probably update to a more recent Quicksilver version. The next query that resulted in visits to this weblog was “laughing man fansubs” (and its variant) with (27 referrals). Laughing Man Fansubs is the only fansubbing group subbing the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Along Complex 2 anime series that I’m aware of.
People also found this weblog via other weblogs most notably Tales from the Red Shed, Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch having linked to my knowledge management article (which still awaits a part 2 <sigh>)… My posting of a trackback on Dan Dickinson’s article on Quicksilver resulted in some hits too.
Browser-wise, the distribution was 901 hits from Mozilla browsers (including FireFox) and 649 hits from Safari users (that includes me most of the time ) while Internet Explorer variants only resulted in 426 hits and Netscape variants in 359 hits.
Looking at that data is weirdly fascinating but really time-consuming. Stattraq is not helping too much here because it doesn’t record the article id properly when it records hits. I am tempted to spend some time developing a bunch of zeitgeist functions so that I can make this analysis faster.
This Fire from the album Franz Ferdinand by Franz Ferdinand
Making Stattraq work better with permalinks.
Oct 1st
I am using Stattraq to keep track of the traffic on this weblog. I installed it back in August and recently installed the ViewCount plugin. However, much to my disappointment, Stattraq doesn’t play that nice if you use permalinks. The problem lies with the fact that Stattraq in its current version does not properly put the article id in its database if permalinks are enabled: it will use the id 0. Of course, ViewCount relies on the article id to work its magic hence the problem…
To solve this issue, I decided to improve how Stattraq was handling the article id and you can too! It’s fairly easy: open stattraq.php (it’s found in the wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress root directory) in a text editor. Find the line that reads:
- $article_id = 0; // default/mixed page – not just for one article
and replace it by the following:
- //$article_id = 0; // default/mixed page – not just for one article
- if (isset($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) && !empty($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'])){
- $article_id = $wpdb->get_var(“SELECT ID FROM $tableposts WHERE 1=1″.$where);
- } else {
- $article_id = 0;
- }
The trick here is to use the url parsing magic found in wp-blog-header.php. That’s where the $where variable gets built. We then use it to retrieve the post id. The check on the server query is required because the index page needs to be processed differently. If the requested page is the index page, the query returns all the posts and get_var returns the id of the first record returned (which is your weblog’s first entry) which is not what we want.
Well, apparently this does not work though I am at a loss right now to figure out why. The code above, executed in the context of index.php, seems to return what I want. However, when executed in stattraq.php, it doesn’t work, resulting in the article_id field being empty… I guess I jumped the gun, thinking that I could use $where in Stattraq but it seems like it’s not going to happen without a fight. I’ll look at that when I get up.
Please note however that I haven’t fully tested this code so bad things might happen. Moreover, I’m both a WordPress and PHP newbie so chances are that my solution is neither elegant nor efficient. Also, smart readers will have noticed that this only addresses one side of the problem: the article id should now be correct in the Stattraq database. However, previous entries will still keep the “0″ article_id. How to fix this is left as an exercise to the reader.
Many thanks to Robert and Thomas for their help!
Obstacle 1 from the album Turn On the Bright Lights by Interpol
