TellMeep

How to install the TellMeep Tracker on your Blog

2008-11-05T18:24:00.007+01:00

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.

Just a simple way to track my Blog's visitors

2008-11-03T15:44:00.012+01:00

Ever since I started my blog at the volkskrantblog.nl, the stats have been tracked by Motigo, the VKB-preferred tracker company.
However, since day one this tracker didn't really do what I wanted it to, but I didn't have the time or energy to dive into the complicated system with separate java-scripts-based page ID's.

What I wanted was basically a simple tracker, showing me which blog entries have been read by which visitor. I don't really need a spiffy graph with all my visitors represented as flags on a gently spinning globe. I would much rather be able to identify which pages are being read (and which ones aren't) without having to resort copying and pasting a separate piece of code into each of the 150+ blog-entries I had written so far. And I'd like to know which days of the week and which times of the day are the most busy.

I most definitely do not want to make Tracker-Management an important time-consuming part of my responsibilities in maintaining a blog. Just paste one piece of code somewhere and w00t, done. So essentially the tracker I had so far has never came even close to working the way I wanted it to.

Premium Subscription...

To add insult to injury, I have recently been the recipient of an extensive series of emails, written with a cascading sense of urgency, where Motigo went from 'inviting' to 'bullying' me into becoming a Premium Subscriber. Wink Wink. Marketing speak for “Show Me The Money!”
After which my Tracker was disabled...

So instead of having to pay for a service that is non-satisfactory in the first place, I figured it might be a nice experiment to go ahead and build my own visitor tracker. Nothing fancy, but just something that reports what I want it to report. And as little installation hassles as possible.

So what I have so far is a PHP-based visitor tracker script, which I essentially wrote for myself. However, since some bloggers at the VolkskrantBlog asked if they could use it as well, i decided to adopt it to more general use. It was a fun and interesting project, and this would be a nice extension to it. And besides a good exercise for the Prefectionist that I am. An exercise in trying to put a work in progress out there, and let other people play with something that is nice, but not prefect. Yet.

Digital fish and chips

Little did I know where that exercise would bring me. The three people that played Beta-tester where incredibly thrilled with TelMiep, which is what the new Visitor Tracker was christened.
- Within a week 15 fellow bloggers had installed TelMiep on their blogs.
- Today, barely a month afyer the first public Beta, TelMiep is rapidly serving one third of the active users and has indexed over 10.000 blog entries.
- This week I was informed that the TelMiep technology would be integrated within the upcoming update to VolksKrantBlog 2.0, and would become the standard tracking technology to be used by the VKB.

What is it that people are so thrilled about?
TellMeep opens up an entirely new dimension to your blog, it seems.
So far, I knew how many people visited a page in the blog somewhere, and I assumed that 90% of those would be for the most recent entry. The older entries where out of sight and slowly being marched down the blog page. Chances are they were somewhere being used to wrap up digital fish and chips with...

It's alive!

Well I was wrong, it turns out. A blog is different from a newspaper in that older entries keep on attracting new readers that are being informed, stimulated or annoyed, depending on the current news. So whenever a certain political issue is being revived again, I immediately see my entries about those subjects coming to life.

Even when no one reacts to my latest posting, it seems I have been able to write a number that keep on attracting interested visitors. I never knew, or realized this, until I saw my TellMeep stats.
It has helped me get a more even perspective on my blog, which also helps me to deal with the 'psychological shock-effect' of a posting that has dropped absolutely dead after two days of hard writing...

A third of the active bloggers at the VKB can't be entirely wrong, I figured, so the last weeks I have been working on rewriting the TelMiep-code for the blogger-engine that drives blogger.com and blogspot.com. I have been my own beta-tester, and I have to say I am very happy with how it turned out.

TellMeep tracks all visits to this blog, and shows me what pages people click on and, if they like what they read, where they click next...

Fun, useful en addictive

Based on the feedback received from a couple of self-professed total digibetes, the installation instructions are clear enough, enabling them to install TellMeep at the first try. W00t!

So, currently those instructions are being translated to the 'blogger-version' and will shortly appear in this blog.
TellMeep.blogspot.com will be the central depository for all things related to TellMeep, with installation instructions, a FAQ, and lots of room for feature requests and feedback.

And yes, I know it is tooting my own horn, but I have to repeat this comment made by fellow-blogger Ernst: “TelMiep is fun, useful en addictive.”

Back to translating!

W00t W00t!

2008-10-23T23:11:00.006+02:00

TellMeep draait nu op de Blogger engine.
Dat zijn dus alle blogs in het domein blogspot.com en blogger.com.
Het installeren is nog iets lastiger dan bij het VKB, maar volgens mij moet dat via een widget ook eenvoudig te regelen zijn. Op de to-do list: hoe maak ik een widget. Zou moeten lukken toch?

De uitleespagina werkt nog niet naar behoren, dus wanneer je nu een teller weet te installeren (zonder de instructies die ik nog moet gaan schrijven...) worden je stats gewoon geteld, maar je ziet nog niks...
Dat gebeurt pas wanneer de uitleespagina het helemaal doet. Hopelijk morgen.

Deze nu even, heel asociaal, cross-posten op het VKB ;-)

De tweede

2008-10-15T18:14:00.001+02:00

Hello BlogoSphere

2008-10-12T16:17:00.003+02:00

W00t!