Google Analytics Problem Solved

I’ve found Google Analytics to be a really useful tool for monitoring traffic to my various web sites. I’m also a big fan of Wordpress, and there just happens to be a Wordpress pluggin that allows you to easily integrate Google Analytics into your Wordpress web sites. Unfortunately, when I switched to the Desk Mess theme, the Analytics module quit working so I lost tracking data for this blog. Fortunately the fix was easy. Wordpress uses a footer.php file to process the footer section of pages. It looks something like this:

<!– begin footer –>

<div style=”clear:both;”></div>
<div style=”clear:both;”></div>

<div id=”footer”>
Copyright &copy; 2007 <a href=”<?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?>/”><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></a> &bull; Using <a href=”http://themes.performancing.com” >Modernpaper</a> theme created by <a href=”http://performancing.com” >Performancing</a>
</div>

<?php do_action(‘wp_footer’); ?>

</body>
</html>

In Desk Mess’ footer.php file, the line in red is missing. Because of that, Wordpress doesn’t process the footer correctly and the Analytics code isn’t added in as it should be. Adding the missing line to footer.php causes Wordpress to correctly process the footer, and Analytics tracking is working correctly again – problem solved. If only they were all so easy…

Hello world!

Welcome to My Blogging Journal. When a friend asked me to take a look at his personal finance site and comment on it, I checked out lots of other sites as well so I could compare his site with others. While I found a lot of really good sites, I also found a lot that frankly are pretty lame. The sad thing is, most of the lame sites seem to be run by people with a lot of enthusiasm for their chosen subject, but they all repeat the same mistakes that make their blogs lame.

I decided to start this site for two reasons. First, I wanted to post my observations on other blogs in the hope that people will stumble across this site and use the information to improve their own blogs. Second, as a personal challenge, I want to see how much traffic I can pull in a niche that is already extremely crowded – blogs about blogs and blogging. So without further adieu, enjoy the site.

Xiaohua