code in the ruins

A while back I was at a small conference in Charlottesville for public affairs types that work at environmental agencies in our region. One of the EPA webmasters gave a presentation about their site. She pointed out that they track the clicks on their website by logging each click in a database. In this way, they can tell which stories are the most popular, and which areas of the page have the highest value and are most visible to users. It has given them data that helps them design their pages.

I liked that idea, so I went home and started to write my own click tracker. What I didn't like about their setup was that each link pointed, not to the actual page that the user wanted, but to a CGI program called "epalink" that would (apparently) log the click, and then bounce the user to the page they really wanted. It's fairly transparent to the users, but I saw a few problems:

• The URL in the status bar is long and ugly
• The page maintainer has to remember to format the links in a certain way
• If applying to a large existing site, changing all the links would be nightmarish

I wanted to work out a way to track links on a page without changing any page body code at all. Since my current interest is JavaScript development, I jumped in and tried to figure out a way to do this the way I wanted.

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del.icio.us was laid low by a power outage recently. Details and updates are on their blog. Obviously this causes trouble for mog.rif.icio.us. Here's hoping they get everything back online soon.

Google announced yesterday that they would provide an API for people to develop their own modules for the Google personalized homepage.

So, to try it out, I wrote one for mog.rif.icio.us. As promised, it was pretty easy. It uses your existing WordPress site with the mog.rif.icio.us plugin already installed. All that's needed is a wrapper script that places the content in a chunk of XML so Google knows how to handle it.

As a demo, you can add a module to the personalized homepage using my URL:

http://code.mogrify.org/wp-content/mog-google.php

It will initally appear as an iframe with a scroll bar, but you can make it display inline on the page, too. Check out the API documentation for how to do this.

I've got more detailed information and instructions on the mog.rif.icio.us project page.

As part of setting up this site, I wrote a plugin for WordPress to display all my del.icio.us bookmarks in the sidebar. It will check once a day to see if any changes have been made, and download the bookmarks if necessary.

Bookmarks are displayed as a DHTML menu, so that you can expand one tag at a time to see all the bookmarks underneath.

I set up a project page for the plugin, which I call mog.rif.icio.us. It's designed as a WordPress plugin, but it should work in any PHP environment (4.3 for now, no PHP5 support yet). You'll be able to download it from there, with more detailed documentation.