October 31st, 2009 by Joe Majewski
After spending a few days tediously sculpting the new site, I am now officially satisfied with the layout and ready for take off. I found this really neat open source software, called Piwik, that tracks various statistics about visitors coming to the site. The software was really easy to install on the server, and it is unique in that the data is live, unlike Google Analytics.
If you’re interested in using this free software for your own website, there are a couple of things that I should point out. By default, it updates the database every 10 seconds (it is supposed to be live, after all), and this could get to be very resource demanding if you are using a shared server. To change this, edit the global.ini.php file located in the config folder, and change the time_before_today_archive_considered_outdated variable to the desired number of seconds between updates. I currently have mine set to update every five minutes, which cuts the load thirty-fold.
There is also a bug I found that seemingly occurs every time you change the activated widgets; I’ve noticed that it only happens with certain web browsers. This glitch causes your page to constantly refresh after displaying a JavaScript error. To fix this, simply truncate your piwik_user_dashboard table and the problem should be instantly solved. You will have to do this every time you decide to change the widgets.
Other than that, I haven’t run into any major issues with the software. I made my traffic stats publicly available, so click here if you want to check it out.
October 30th, 2009 by Joe Majewski
As much as I’d like to really start cranking out some new content, there is still a lot of overhead work that needs to be done. I spent several hours testing out various WordPress themes before I finally landed with this one, and then I spent another day or two playing around with the stylesheet and other files included with the package.
While I do believe this theme to be visually appealing, it generates almost no meta data, which is a huge problem. My goal is to solve this problem by the end of tomorrow, and possibly get some other things finished as well. If I want to get more people to see my content, it is important to define meta data for the article’s description and keywords.
As soon as I’m satisfied with how the site appears to both viewers and Googlebot, I can start focusing on rolling out some “real” content for the blog. And it’s back to work I go!
October 29th, 2009 by Joe Majewski
Welcome to my personal blog. This brief article will serve as an introduction for what is to come. If you haven’t yet figured it out, my name is Joe Majewski, and I am currently a Junior at Northern Illinois University majoring in Computer Science with a theoretical emphasis.
I will be primarily using this web space to document my personal accomplishments in the art of Computer Science, so do not expect to read an article describing the delicious steak that I ate for dinner last night. If I find something useful that I believe others will benefit from, that would be a prime candidate for something I may choose to write about.
With that said, please feel free to contact me with any business-related inquiries that you may have. My email address is `admin [at] this-website’s-domain-name [dot] com`.