Binary Code

I’m currently working on three Rails projects, two for my day job and one for myself in my spare time. Thankfully the philosophy of DRY translates as well across projects as it does across files within a single project.

A couple days ago, on my personal project which is not yet released or public, I was at the stage where I was looking to put some sort of user visitation stats into it but set that aside as something that was going to be a bit of a pain to implement, or would require learning Google Analytics or some such thing.

That is until Thiago Jackiw released the first vers of his SiteMeter Sitealizer Rails plugin. Though it’s just at version 1.0 and has only been out a couple of days it integrated into my project incredibly easily and gracefully thus far.

I really like that he’s though enough about it to make the stats login seperate from user login, as well as giving the option of making stats public. And it looks great to boot.

Update: Thiago has changed the name to Sitealizer. I like the new name better.

For fun I’m trying out FeedBurner’s FeedFlare feature on this site but until I did some trouble-shooting it wouldn’t work with WordPress. Turns out the charset="utf-8" attribute in the FeedFlare script was causing it to fail. Deleting it from the script tag makes it all work fine and dandy, as you can see from the “Email This” and “Digg This” links down at the bottom of each post.

Update: Or not. Seems they’ve disappeared again. Seems the javascript is either not being loaded or not being executed. Hmm….

Update, the second: The error is mine, not FeedBurner’s. The links were not showing up only in Safari - they worked fine in Firefox. After a night’s sleep I woke up this morning, remembered that I run PithHelmet in Safari, turned that off and voila! FeedFlare links! It seems PithHelmet blocks Javascripts linking to external sites, treating those as probable ad-loading scripts; I’ve been using PithHelmet for so long I’d practically forgotten it wasn’t part of Safari itself. Mea culpa.