Planete Fortier
Well after much debating, I have finally caved in an created a web log using Blogger rather than building one myself. I had actually started building one earlier this year. The underlying database seemed pretty simple and the blog and comment entry pages are very easy to write using Dreamweaver and ASP. I guess the thing that made me reconsider it was the eventual size of the database and being able to control the dates properly. You see this site is actually hosted on a server in the UK and so the server time is actually 5 hours ahead of EST. Therefore all posts would need to back dated 5 hours. This gets awfully complicated when having to set the time back past the midnight mark. Either way, this made it too complicated and I guess I got discouraged. It's not as if I can't write my own pages,after all, I do after all write web articles for the site. Actually I'm just finishing up a two parter on Drive-by Hacking and Wireless Computing. I'll post details of it as soon as it's done.
So you can imagine how pleased I was when I finally broke down and gave Blogger a better look. You see as a web developer I don't like to admit I can't program something, but at the same time I don't see any use in trying to re-invent the wheel. This is the main reason that I use Dreamweaver rather than hand code everything like I use to. The other reason I didn't want to use an external solution was that I am manic about keeping track of visits to the site and heaving hosted it hosted elsewhere I would never have been able to see how the blog was being received. I wrote my own tracking program over a year ago and have been developing it ever since. It's ideal for small database driven sites that don't want to pay the extra $400.00 to $500.00 to use a package like Webtrends. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Webtrends, in fact it's great for larger sites or standard HTML sites. But if you have a database driven site, collecting browser data and stats simply means creating a stats table in your database and then adding a few lines of code to every page. I created a tracking page which is all ASP code and simply call to it at the beginning of my templates. So once I have written one trackable page, all my pages become trackable. Now I don't make the stats available to the public yet, it's not like I get more than a couple thousand visits to the site per month that I can brag about, but it's quite cool to be able to drill down the dates to every single hit, check which bots and crawlers have been to the site and which pages they have indexed, and what browsers people are actually using. There is nothing worse than spending hours creating a Netscape 4 compliant page when you only get 126 visit from Netscape 4 users per year. What surprised me even more is that 63% of my visitors (not counting search engines) are using Internet Explorer 6, I was so sure that most people were too lazy to bother upgrading their PC's let alone their browsers. It all just goes to show important these stats can be in helping a web developer or even a company serve their visitors better.
It will be interesting to see how this blog is received, I know most visitors spend more than 3 minutes here before moving on but I would to love to know what they actually think of my efforts.
Good reading...
Saturday, May 22, 2004
Well after much debating, I have finally caved in an created a web log using Blogger rather than building one myself. I had actually started building one earlier this year. The underlying database seemed pretty simple and the blog and comment entry pages are very easy to write using Dreamweaver and ASP. I guess the thing that made me reconsider it was the eventual size of the database and being able to control the dates properly. You see this site is actually hosted on a server in the UK and so the server time is actually 5 hours ahead of EST. Therefore all posts would need to back dated 5 hours. This gets awfully complicated when having to set the time back past the midnight mark. Either way, this made it too complicated and I guess I got discouraged. It's not as if I can't write my own pages,after all, I do after all write web articles for the site. Actually I'm just finishing up a two parter on Drive-by Hacking and Wireless Computing. I'll post details of it as soon as it's done.
So you can imagine how pleased I was when I finally broke down and gave Blogger a better look. You see as a web developer I don't like to admit I can't program something, but at the same time I don't see any use in trying to re-invent the wheel. This is the main reason that I use Dreamweaver rather than hand code everything like I use to. The other reason I didn't want to use an external solution was that I am manic about keeping track of visits to the site and heaving hosted it hosted elsewhere I would never have been able to see how the blog was being received. I wrote my own tracking program over a year ago and have been developing it ever since. It's ideal for small database driven sites that don't want to pay the extra $400.00 to $500.00 to use a package like Webtrends. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Webtrends, in fact it's great for larger sites or standard HTML sites. But if you have a database driven site, collecting browser data and stats simply means creating a stats table in your database and then adding a few lines of code to every page. I created a tracking page which is all ASP code and simply call to it at the beginning of my templates. So once I have written one trackable page, all my pages become trackable. Now I don't make the stats available to the public yet, it's not like I get more than a couple thousand visits to the site per month that I can brag about, but it's quite cool to be able to drill down the dates to every single hit, check which bots and crawlers have been to the site and which pages they have indexed, and what browsers people are actually using. There is nothing worse than spending hours creating a Netscape 4 compliant page when you only get 126 visit from Netscape 4 users per year. What surprised me even more is that 63% of my visitors (not counting search engines) are using Internet Explorer 6, I was so sure that most people were too lazy to bother upgrading their PC's let alone their browsers. It all just goes to show important these stats can be in helping a web developer or even a company serve their visitors better.
It will be interesting to see how this blog is received, I know most visitors spend more than 3 minutes here before moving on but I would to love to know what they actually think of my efforts.
Good reading...
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