Daylight Saving Time
November 3rd, 2007 at 10:13 PM by Matt FreedmanIf you’re in Canada or the United States, don’t forget to set your clocks back one hour tonight. Your computers should automatically change. If you have your cell phone set to network time, it should change to, although you may need to restart it for it to grab the network time again.
If you have a WordPress blog, don’t forget to adjust the time offset for DST. It’s under the section “Date and Time” on the Options page. It’s likely similar for other blogging software to.
Make sure you change every clock, though, otherwise it might screw you up a bit. š
At least it won’t be as dark in the mornings anymore. š
Track Searches With Google Analytics
November 3rd, 2007 at 3:19 PM by Matt Freedman
Google has rolled out a new feature in Google Analytics. You are now able to track searches that have been made on your site. This means that if your site, blog or forums has built-in search, you’ll be able to get some statistics for it.
I think that this new feature will be quite helpful to many people. You’ll be able to see what people are search for and possibly adjust things accordingly. You’ll also be able to see any refined searches by the same visitor, which will help you in seeing how effective your site, blog or forums search is.
How the tracking works is that you tell Google Analytics what URL parameter your search uses, and it’ll start to track all the searches on your site. If you already have Analytics tracking your site, no additional code is required. Just a note, Site Search tracking is not enabled by default. Also, it’s currently only available for English Analytics accounts, but Google says that it should be more widely available soon.
Here’s how you enable it, and configure it to work with WordPress.
- Login to Google Analytics
- Under “Website Profiles“, find the site you want to enable Site Search tracking on, and click the “Edit” link corresponding to it
- On the Profile Settings page, click the edit link for “Main Website Profile Information“
- Find the section called “Site Search“
- Click the radio button “Do Track Site Search“
- In the input box that pops up, enter in “s“
- Decide whether or not you want Analytics to strip out the parameter stuff when displaying it to you. I chose for it to not to.
- Leave the question “Do you use categories for site search?” as no
- Click Save Changes
There you have it. Google Analytics will start tracking any searches made on your site right away. This is assuming that WordPress is still using the default format of “?s=search+term” for searching. If someone searches in a specific category in your site, it should show up in Google Analytics as “/category/cat-name/?s=search+term” (assuming that’s have your permalinks are setup).
To see your Site Search reports, go to the Reports of the site you enabled this on, click on “Content” in the sidebar, then click on “Site Search” under the Content menu.
Enjoy your Site Tracking (oh, and try not to become mesmerised in the reports š )!
Book Three in Inheritance Cycle Announced and Something Else Unexpected
October 30th, 2007 at 5:55 PM by Matt FreedmanBook Three (name not yet released) of the Inheritance Cycle was announced today. It will be published on September 28, 2008. The Inheritance Cycle’s first 2 books are called Eragon and Eldest.
You may have noticed that I’m calling it the Inheritance Cycle and not the Inheritance Trilogy. This is the interesting part. Along with the announcement of the third book’s release date was a video by, the author, Christopher Paolini.
“I plotted out the Inheritance series as a trilogy nine years ago, when I was fifteen. At that time, I never
imagined Iād write all three books, much less that they would be published” said Paolini. “When I finally
delved into Book Three, it soon became obvious that the remainder of the story was far too big to fit in one
volume. Having spent so long thinking about the series as a trilogy, it was difficult for me to realize that, in
order to be true to my characters and to address all of the plot points and unanswered questions Eragon and
Eldest raised, I needed to split the end of the series into two books.”
Yes, that’s right, a Fourth Book! Paolini also mentioned that a main character will die at the end of Book Three… I wonder who…
Random House also released a press release (pdf) for the announcement.
I’ve read both Eragon and Eldest and have been wondering when Book Three would be coming out. Not for another 11 months, though… Oh well, at least there will be another book after that to!
Oh, and Eragon and Eldest are great books, and I’d recommend anyone to read them!
WordPress 2.3.1 Released
October 26th, 2007 at 11:32 PM by Matt Freedman
Not long after WordPress 2.3 was released, WordPress 2.3.1 has been released today! WordPress 2.3.1 includes bug and security fixes.
Also, if you use Windows Live Writer, 2.3.1 includes the necessary files to make tagging possible.
To see the full run-down of the changed things, check out WordPress’ Trac.
Well, at least we all know that the update notification works!
I’ve upgraded, have you? š
Root of Windows Activation Problems Found?
October 24th, 2007 at 2:30 PM by Matt FreedmanRemember back in July when I had those activation problems with Vista? No? I didn’t think so… Anyways, Vista had suddenly said it wasn’t activated and that it was genuine (which is crap, since I bought it legally). This actually happened once (or maybe twice, I don’t remember) more after that, too.
Well, it appears that APC Magazine (I’ve never heard of it before…) has figured out what the problem might be.
You see, when Vista is installed on a computer, it detects what hardware is in the machine and creates what I like to call a “hardware sum”. This is now the base sum. Whenever you change the hardware in the computer, Vista decides how big the change is and remembers that. If your current hardware sum becomes to different from the base sum, Vista deactivates itself. This is all done to prevent piracy. They don’t want you to take an image of your machine and put that on another machine. Which is actually a good way of trying to prevent piracy… Okay, so I did install a new graphics card, and maybe because I use multiple flash drives and other USB-based devices, it just decided that the hardware was too different, and deactivated itself.
But, it gets even more interesting. There’s a major flaw in the way Microsoft implemented this. Instead of using the id from the hardware (which isn’t necessarily unique), it gathers the sum from the details of the device drivers. So, when you install or change hardware, the sum changes, that’s fine. But, even upgrading your device drivers can cause the sum to change! Because the details of the driver can change version-to-version and most people use drivers by Windows at first and then upgrade them to drivers from the manufacturer, the sum can change. Which, when combined with actual hardware changes, could be enough to change Vista to deactivate itself.
This seems like a viable explanation for why this happened to me. But, the only hardware change I had made then was a new graphics card. So, maybe I updated some drivers at one point… Although, Asus hasn’t released any Vista-compatible drivers for my motherboard yet, so the only way actual hardware (not USB-based devices) drivers could have been updated would be through Windows Update and they would be Microsoft drivers (and you would like they wouldn’t change the hardware sum)… Also, the activation window didn’t have everything that it should have on the Phone page. it should have had numbers that I would have to give to the support rep, which would allow them to give me a key that would reactivate Vista. Plus, after a few restarts, Vista went back to saying it was activated and genuine.
APC Magazine says that Vista developers are working on fixing these problems… Hopefully they do and use a better way of getting a hardware sum then device drivers…
