Gotbadger

Ive been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 with the 9m guys recently and we have decided to enter into some competitive play. All this means we needed a website so in true quick and dirty fashion I knocked up a WP site and modified an existing theme.

Now one thing I thought that would be pretty cool would be a server monitor plug-in, there was nothing currently out there so using my non existent knowledge of widgets I tried my luck… and failed terribly I just couldn’t get the server to query correctly at all. I guessed someone must have done something similar to this in PHP the answer was GameQ. Its a nice little library that wraps everything up nicely and gives us back a lot of really easy arrays using this and my basic understanding of plugins I managed to knock up the server monitor you see on the 9m website

I have plans at some point to improve and hopefully release the widget under GPL when I have a better understanding of how to deal with the configuration side of things, until then its all hard coded configuration. If anyone’s interested at all in the source code drop me a line.

Now if your the kind of person I am you will love stats. I don’t even think its a geek thing, some people just don’t seem to be able to resist the lure of the how many and when, from programing to football to government reports you cant escape them so why should my site be any different?

Pretty much everyone has heard of google analytics by now but I wounder how many people really know what it can do and have seen it in action and how many people actually use it to its full potential? Untill a couple of days ago I knew neither what it could do or used it to its full potential now I’m doing both and the ammount of detailed statistics it can show is amazing maybe a little scary. Most people will just use the bit of code it gives you when you first get an analytics account this will give you some info but not everything to get the full benifit you need to do stuff with onclicks to monitor outbound links downloads etc. Now thats a lot of work you may think (unles you do some horibly slow client side dom traversal) well it is if you’ve already got an existing site but then I got thinking - “wordpress? somone must have done it” and they had.

Enter Joost de Valk a SEO loving guy from the Netherlands. I had a look at a few plugins but his was the best you can get an awfull lot of data on outgoing links and downloads using this and it has the ablity to do some other stuff aswell he was also kind enough to give some help and decent default settings to get you going straight away.

All this got me thinking about the data that could possibly be collected on a e-commerce site and which no doubt is collected by the major players and the value that data must have to them. Now with using analytics I can see the potential it has in the smaller market and how a smaller nieche store might really benifit from it and the potential extra value it might add to any such site…

The people at sitepoint are giving away one of their books, check it out at http://rails.sitepoint.com its free for the next 60 days so get it while you can…

It was in some respects a long time coming like a lot of people out there I have made the move to word-press and for once actually managed to create a semi-decent (I think) looking theme. I liked Mephisto but I couldn’t do ‘things’ with it. It kind of leads me into what I have been having quite some thought about latley and that is PHP.

I ve had somewhat of a resurgence in my love for PHP, Ive been toying with RoR and done some C# stuff recently at work and I came to miss the pure dirtiness of PHP. The reason I originally had started to hate PHP can probably be pinned on two things; doing maintenance on existing projects and as a result writing increasingly hacky and horrible code. The change of heart came from realising finally that I could write beautiful OO PHP5 that was incredibly rewarding to write if I wanted to. The epiphany was mostly down to the fact that programing in a language like C# made me give up a lot of my bad programing habits. Its quite easy to write bad C# apps but it quickly becomes quite self evident how horrendous it is, while doing something equally bad in PHP like mixing up function with formatting isn’t so obvious until much later when problems start cropping up. By bringing these good habits from C# and RoR to PHP5 I can write much more reliable and readable code thats also fairly agile. This article by Derek Sivers kinda sums things up.