Video Review of Woopra Web Analytics

Wednesday, April 30 2008 - , , - 11 comments

So this weekend, the staff at Woopra.com started approving new sites as they have released a new beta build of their service.  After installing their latest bits of code, here are some of my thoughts on using their web analytics engine on JefTek.com in a video review.

Opening a can of Woopra...

Monday, April 28 2008 - 8 comments

Who would have thought that the people would get so excited about statistics, but it appears people are chomping at the bit to try out Woopra web analytics from the comments and forum posts. (yes, I am one of the guilty...) Today is the day that Woopra has announced they would start a mass activation of pending approvals to use the new version of their innovate platform for gleaning information about web users. I had first applied to Woopra when I posted about Analytics for Blogs , and have been in "pending" s tatus ever since then. As geeky as it sounds, I am quite curious how well this...

Web Analytics for Blogs

Tuesday, April 01 2008 - - 3 comments

Since I converted this site to use a hosted server, one of the benefits of running my own site is having the ability to glean statistics about who is coming to visit the via web analytics.  Here are some of the packages I've looked at using while I am trying to figure out which offers the best features.

GraffitiCMS Tip: Formatting blog post excerpts

Tuesday, April 01 2008 - - 0 comments

Many of the themes for GraffitiCMS contain an index.view which will display the first few lines of your post as an excerpt on the front page.   Here are some tips on how you can better control what is displayed in that excerpt, and why you may want to enhance what is displayed.

Using the GraffitiCMS Blog Extensions Plug-In

Monday, March 31 2008 - , - 12 comments

This weekend I had the pleasant surprise to see that Kevin Harder of Telligent, had posted that the new Blog Extensions Plug-In was now published to the GCMS marketplace.  Here are some of my experiences with using the new module on this site, which I hope will make it simple for others to add some great features to GraffitiCMS.

Graffiti CMS is released!

Tuesday, February 19 2008 - - 1 comments

Telligent released the Graffiti CMS platform from beta this morning, and is now at v1.0. Excellent work for the whole team, and for all the people in the community who helped make this a great product to use. This site has already been upgraded to the release code from beta2 bits, and I have to say the upgrade went very smoothly as I had no issues during the process. So if you are looking for a great .NET blogging platform that runs on Windows and Linux (Mono), and that is free for personal use, I would highly recommend it. I also should add the Licensing model to upgrade from Express to commercial...

GraffitiCMS Tip: use www in your site domain name

Wednesday, February 13 2008 - - 0 comments

As of the latest release at this time (Beta 2), new installs of Graffiti CMS default to using just the domain name ( http://jeftek.com ) for your site. All requests to the domain as www.jeftek.com will be redirected to the jeftek.com site via a 301 redirect which is search engine friendly. There was a discussion on the GCMS forums as to whether it was a good/bad to have the www in the domain name which you can read here . But what if you want to use www.jeftek.com because you feel it is the best possible address for your site? It's a simple edit to the web.config file in your site: <!-- Helps...

GraffitiCMS Tip: Use Advanced Editor for posts

Sunday, February 10 2008 - - 1 comments

It turns out that Telligent has 2 editor modes in the post editor: Simple and Default. In an effort to keep things "Simple" they shipped with the editor in Simple mode. You can change the editor to Default Mode by editing 2 places in the correct file. The Advanced editor offers more options such as posting Smileys, Flash, Tables, and other options. I think it was a smart idea to ship with the simple toolbar, as many of these options would be daunting for the "simple" target they are going for. I found this tip on the MKLAB blog which actually found it from the GCMS support forum...

Converting Wordpress themes for Graffiti

Sunday, February 10 2008 - - 0 comments

Since I'm sure many people who are running Wordpress and wanting to migrate to Graffiti will want to take their current theme with them, this is something that will help out. Follow this link to The Web Gambit to view the guide on how to convert your theme. If you are interested in learning about creating new themes for GraffitiCMS please check out Creating a Theme for Graffiti CMS...

GraffitiCMS Tip: Set your Favicon

Sunday, February 10 2008 - - 0 comments

Ever notice the little icon next to the URL in your browser's address bar? That is the site's favicon, which is meant to be an image to represent the site in your Favorites/Bookmarks. Be default, Graffiti uses the red/blue spray can logo, but you can replace it with your own image. There are many sites on the web that will convert your favorite graphic into a proper favicon.ico file, or allow you to create your image by editing pixels to your design. I used this site to create the favicon for my website. This is the favicon.ico for this site: In Graffiti you need to place the favicon.ico file in...