joshuacody.net

Ramblings and musings from faith to front-end development and everything in between.

There have been plenty of under-the-hood changes going on around these parts that hopefully none of you noticed. This post will be pretty nerdy, but there might be some value for anybody.

Content Management System

I’ve been moderately outspoken in my criticism of ExpressionEngine 2. If you’re wondering why, just read what Kenny Meyers said. I would still argue that EE is a very flexible, potent system for developers, but coupled with the difficulties it brings for end-users, I just wasn’t comfortable using it daily.

So where to turn?

I’ve built a couple of sites on WordPress 3, which was a wonderful upgrade. It’s much more flexible while maintaining its ease-of-use and simplicity. Huge kudos to the team on that. But a CMS still feels like overkill.

Enter Jekyll. It’s so simple that it makes my brain hurt.

I’ve been writing my posts in Markdown for awhile. Essentially, it’s a human-readable syntax to write HTML without using a WYSIWYG editor. And with Jekyll, you write your posts in markdown, tell it a template to use to process said template, and voilà. You’re done. Your text editor is your CMS.1

And it generates flat HTML files that are served lightning-fast and without reliance on a database, so no painful crashes because of a database being slow. It’s super useful when your wife and mom need to visit your site at the same time.

Analytics

I’ve also left my first love for stat-tracking. I was a happy Mint user for quite some time, but I was never thrilled with the blandness of the interface or the cumbersome upgrade process. So I turned where everyone else did, Google Analytics. But what good statistician is satisfied with once-a-day stats?

I’d remembered hearing a thing or two about Clicky at some point as well, so I checked them out.

I was amazed. They have some great features on top of what you normally expect from an analytics service. Maybe most of you have been tracking stats with this granularity for awhile, but here are a few things that are blowing me away:

  • User-by-user sessions. Want to know what the user from Comcast in Scranton, PA at 8:18am did? You can see exactly which pages they visited. You can also name visitors so you know exactly who they are when they come back.
  • Live stats. You can see how many users are currently visiting your site and the actions they’re doing as well.
  • Native iPhone app. There’s a really nicely done native app with (limited) push notifications for your viewing pleasure.

Next Up

I really need to clean house. I did the HTML, CSS, and JS for this site a year ago. It’s a little embarrassing to think that folks are viewing the source on this baby. I’d also live to get access to bit.ly Pro and track shortened hits from jpcody.in. Oh yeah, and after a server re-organization, I need to update all my portfolio projects so the links work again.

Totally Lost?

I don’t know what to tell you, I’m sorry this wasn’t more exciting for you. Here are two wonderful things: The Inevitable Decline Due to Clutter by Seth Godin, a Japanese treadmill game, and a great post on liking, loving, and faith at my favorite blog of 2010.

Noted

  1. OK, I oversimplified this a bit. If you're really curious, there are more steps. I run a ruby site generator from the command line, which processes the markdown files as .html files and builds the site. Then, I preview the site locally, use Git to push it up when all looks well, and have a post-update hook that automatically pulls the files to my live directory. Then there's no shortage of .htaccess magic to run the site out of a subdirectory. And huge thanks go to Dan Reedy for his help throughout. [Jump Back]