Author: frans

Professor of Information Studies and Interactive Media, esp. Digital Culture and Game Studies in the Tampere University, Finland. Occasional photographer and gardener.

google analytics with wordpress

Measuring traffic in such a low-traffic site as this one is probably vanity taken to an extreme, but I have tried it anyways – at least partly to understand how the various web measurements systems work. Google Analytics is a free, very comprehensive system that offers much more information than all those log analyser programs I have been trying out before. But since when I switched this blog to WordPress some time ago, I noticed a significant drop in the site visitor statistics that Google Analytics was reporting. It was only then when I realised that the Google system relies on a javascript embedded in all monitored pages, and WordPress is all database and PHP. It was not showing on the radar. Luckily, it appears that several people have figured out how to make Google Analytics work through a plugin in WordPress. I have now downloaded and activated this one from Johann Richard – lets see how it works out (and if there are actually anyone reading these notes, anyways).

Links: http://www.google.com/analytics/

http://mycvs.org/archives/2005/11/14/google-analytics-wordpress-plugin/

Edit: I don’t think that the first plugin was working (even me cannot have zero visitors, in these days of crowded information superhighways) — I am now trying another Google Analytics plugin, this time from Boakes.org; see: http://boakes.org/analytics

Edit2: The Boakes version was working, but I ended also upgrading to the WordPress Reports plugin by Joe Tan, which generates admin reports based on Google Analytics and Feedburner data. In any case, the number of visitors in this blog is down -92% according to these reports, as compared to the Blogger days. 😦 Link: http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/

sf and games panel

sf and games panel
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Shot from the Finncon podium: a view of the audience, for a change. Our SF/FAN & Games panel was fun, even if the topic was rather loosely defined. Participants: Markku Lappalainen, Jyrki J.J. Kasvi (MP), Aleksi Kuutio, Lassi Kurkijärvi, Olli Sinerma, and me.

paasitorni

paasitorni
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

In today’s location, Paasitorni we had two papers, Kristiina Svensson on mimesis (or rather simulation of communication) in French surreal/satirical modern fiction, and Tanja Sihvonen on ‘script’ as a critical concept useful for literary, media and game studies alike. Rather promising stuff. Guest of Honor Jeff VanderMeer made a speech on the practical issues of cross-genre authorship, and also made an interesting point about certain “controlled inconsistency” being important for creating realistic sense of location. A city is always a footnote to another city. Another author from 1968 born generation, Justina Robson was also speaking about genre from the perspective of power (and money) relations of literary institution. Also rather disillusioned about academic world, discussion with Robson circulated around traumatic opposites like separation of emotion from intellect.

villa kivi

villa kivi
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Here is my cameraphone shot of Villa Kivi, a nice house, owned by Helsinki authors’ associations, and the location of the first day in the science fiction researcher meeting. The papers in the first day were: Vadim Chupasov, Rewriting reality: from alternative history to ‘alternate story’; Merja Leppälahti, Matka vainajien maille; Jari Käkelä, Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and American expansionism; and Sanna Lehtonen, Transformation, gender and age in postmodern children’s fantasy – Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Price crossing the borders.– An interesting, even if a rather diverse lot!

finncon 2006, SF researcher meeting

Tomorrow I will be off to Finncon, the major science fiction and fantasy event of Finland. This time taking place in Helsinki, we will also have the traditional science fiction researcher meeting there, this time with the theme “Exploring the Borders of the Fantastic.” There will also be a games and science fiction session in Saturday, feel welcome to drop in.
See: meeting the at http://www.finncon.org/fi/node/116 – and the programme: http://www.finncon.org/fi/taxonomy/term/32

blog server tech

Since I do these software and hardware tests to learn about them (and they are interesting and sometimes fun, too), I will shortly document here the technology used for this new blog site:

  • HP Proliant ML 110 server
  • Powerware UPS 5115-750i/6 uninterruptible power source
  • Fujitsu-Siemens Storagebird XL external 250 GB disk for backups
  • Linux Ubuntu Drapper Drake (6.06) operating system
  • Apache 2.0.55 web server software, with several extensions, including mod_php5, mod_rewrite, and mod_ssl (for several different features, including more secure system access)
  • PHP scripting language version 5.1.2
  • cURL, with libcurl version 7.15.1 (for enhanced URL manipulation)
  • phpMyAdmin, a set of MySQL administration scripts for web-based access
  • mySQL database server and client, versions 5.0.22, with various extensions for PHP, Python and other uses
  • Postfix mail transport agent (v. 2.2.10) with various antispam tools and safeguard implementations, necessary for the WordPress notifications such as registration password mails to go out

And on top of those, the actual blog:

  • WordPress, version 2.0.2-2, with numerous plug-ins for comment spam management, Flickr and email integration, Cron-jobs, and so on.

This is not the most recent version of WordPress, but I let Ubuntu to maintain my software packages through its Synaptic Package Management, to maintain compatibility and automated system upgrading. But in this case the latest stable release of WordPress (2.0.4) had implemented an important change by removing ‘Check Admin Referer’ security measure, which was exactly that feature which created most troubles in this installation. Admin Referer is a logic where WordPress tries to make sure that only the rightful admin has access to all admin pages by checking that the previous page accessed was also part of the admin console. In my case there was an error in the way the blog address (URI) was registered into the database, leading to a situation where every attempt to fix the error was stopped by the Admin Referer check, which did not think I was coming from correct admin pages (due to the previous faulty registration of the WPress install directory). A complete Catch-22 situation. In the end, I had to learn to edit the mySQL database manually in order to fix the wrong entry, and installing, comparing and learning all the tools needed for this took also more time. The more current WordPress versions use something called Nonce to pass a unique code from page to page during the administration processes. Good luck so that you never have to get stuck into this particular hole.

Read more:

http://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-hackers/2006-April/005666.html

http://asymptomatic.net/2006/06/01/2370/what-is-all-this-nonce-sense/

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_ubuntu_6.06

welcome, wordpress

After some weeks of installation (this has not been exactly a simple process), I decided to replace my old Blogger blog today with this shiny, new WordPress one.

There were numerous curious (read: linux-esoteric) traps in the my WordPress installation, many of them related to the half-documented manner WordPress is currently integrated with the Ubuntu Linux distribution I am using. So, even if this has many advanced features and is very expandable with numerous different themes and plugins, I am still uncertain whether I can recommend WordPress for a more casual user. Certainly, having an account in www.wordpress.com should be straightforward enough, but if you consider setting up WordPress into your own server, with the associated Apache, PHP and MySQL configuration issues, I recommend you consider once again. (Many thanks for Nikke in sorting my troubles out!)

Outlines, August, late summer – pt. 3

Further on the road into impressionism — I decided that the pixel-sharp shapes and unprecisely captured colours really do not convey my experience of this hazy, hot summer (30-32C is what my thermometer is constantly saying these days). Heat is something oppressive, smelling of dying grass.

This Photoshop cutout conveys better some of that feeling.

Tohloppi moblog-watercolour-sunset, part 1

There is always a beautiful sunset, rare bird or butterfly flying by when you do NOT carry your best camera and lens with you. With the crappy cameraphone, you can not really get the tones, nor details of the scene. What to do? Well, how about stepping away from the pursuit of realism for a moment, and try aiming for something clearly impressionistic instead? Couple of experiments with a cameraphone and a Photoshop filter.

475 + 1 FONero

The UPS courier brought today my FON router (I think the price of shipping was actually more than double the price of the €5 router), and after some tweaking, this is now written wirelessly, as a proud member of the world-wide FONero community. Cheers! However, more fellow Linuses would clearly be required to make this genuinely useful, rather than just philosophical or ethical investment. 475 users in a country as large and sparsely populated as Finland is not much. But now there is 475 + 1. See: fon maps: Finland.