Wednesday, November 5, 2008

How to install the TellMeep Tracker on your Blog

TellMeep is a work in progress, and therefore basically is never really finished.
However it is 'finished' enough to post these installation instructions, which will take you through the installation process in five easy steps. The entire process shouldn't take more than 15 minutes.

What you will need:
- Access to your blog's Dashboard.
- In step 4 you will need to copy your blogID. If you already know it, keep it at hand in some text-document, so you can copy-paste later on. If you don't know your blogID yet, step 4 will explain where you can find it. It is no big deal, it's just the number you see in your adress bar whenever you create or edit a posting...

The easiest way to install TellMeep, is to create a new page-element, and make that element an image.


1) Create the new Page-Element

You 'll need to log-in to your Blogger-account, and then choose 'Customize' from the Toolbar.



In the Customize-menu, click:
1) Layout
2) Page Elelements
3) Add a Gadget







2 Adding an Image

The 'Gadget' you want to create is aan Image, this is currently the 8th option from the Basic Gagdets.


Click the 'Plus'-icon the add an image to your blog





3) Turning this image into your TellMeep Tracker

First you will need to tell Blogger where to find the image.



The image is located on the web, so check that option.
Copy and paste this text, literally into the 'From the Web' field:

http://telmiep.nl/tellmeep.php


Blogger will automatically locate and check the image.
If all goes well. you'll see a green-and blue icon appearing:




4) Almost Done: Adding the URL for your Stats-page

Note: This step requires some copying and pasting. The easiest way to do that, is to open a blank document in your favorite text-editor, and do all the copying and pasting in there. then copy the finished product to the Blogger-fields mentioned below.

In order for you, and other people to see your stats, you will need to add a link to your Stats-page, and for that you need the URL of your stats-page. The URL has this template :

http://tellmeep.com/?blogID=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

In this template, you'll need to replace the XXXX with your blogID, which should currently be visible in your adress bar.
It is the big number you see in the image below.
This number is followed by an '&' and some more code, which you can both discard.



(In my case it is 6227246902447806866, your number will be different)
Just copy the number, (not the entire url), over the XXXX:
You URL should now look like this:

http://tellmeep.com/?blogID=6227246902447806866

(So no xxx's anymore, and just one single number behind the equal-sign.)

This is the URL you will need to paste into the field labelled Link.

The window should now look like the one below:




5) Finishing up

Add a Title, 'My Stats' for example, and a Caption, like 'TellMeep Stats'.

When you press Save next, you have succesfully installed the TellMeep-tracker on your blog!



You will see the LayOut-page of your blog, with the spot where the counter will appear.
If you want to, you can rearrange the order in which the different elements appear here as well, by dragging the box to the location you want it to appear.


When you click 'View Blog', it should look like this:






You are Done!


Now, if all went well, when you click the TellMeep-icon (Whooah, not right now, wait for some visitors to be logged first...), you will be taken to your Stats-pages. The name of your blog and the titles of the entries that people have visited so far will appear automatically, there is nothing else you need to do now, but go and write another blog-entry!

If all is not well, you will either not see the TellMeep-icon, or the link will not take you to your stat-pages, but somebody elses, or none at all.
If you don't see the icon, a mistake was probably made in step 3.
If the link doesn't work, a typo was probably made in step 4.
(If you link to the TellMeep-stats, you have probably copied my blogID into the URL, instead of your blogID. Please check the adress-bar of your browser for the correct blogID.

If things still do not work as expected, please send me an email and I'll try to help you out from here.