Graffiti CMS – Building out the Infrastructure
Now that my basic blog is running, it’s time to beef it up and add some back-end plumbing to keep the site working smoothly. Graffiti CMS provides three very nice “hooks” that make it easy to keep statistics on page views, statistics on subscriptions to my RSS feeds, and to help prevent comment spam.
Web Statistics
There’s a school of thought which says that to improve something you need to measure it. For websites, that means tracking page views. There are several ways of tracking page views including web server logs or adding some special Javascript code to each page. To support the latter method, Graffiti has a special hook that allows me to specify some Javascript code to be automatically added to each page displayed. IT’s found in the Graffiti Control Panel by going to “Site Options” and then “Settings”.
While there are many companies that provide these services, Google offers a free service called Google Analytics. It may or may not be the best, but it’s a great place to start and the price is right. To use Google Analytics to monitor my blog, I needed to go to their website and provide an email address. After registering, I’m given some Javascript code that can be pasted into the field in Graffiti. That’s really all there is to it. Now it’s just a matter of checking the reports regularly.
There’s a great series of posts by Carson McComas on taking advantage of some of the advanced features of Google Analytics. It’s a lot to read, but there’s an incredible amount of knowledge covered:
RSS Feed Statistics
Just above the field for Web Statistics, there’s a field titled “FeedBurner Url”.
FeedBurner is another free Google service that specializes in adding value around RSS Feeds. The idea is to put a bit of indirection between my RSS feed and readers subscribing to my blog. I set up an account at FeedBurner and register my “real” RSS feed URL. FeedBurner then gives me an alternate RSS feed that I give out as my public RSS feed URL. Now FeedBurner can be a middleman and provide a number of services. They’ll check my blog regularly, massage the data a bit, and then cache the information for everyone else to use. In addition to keeping track of the number of people that request my feed (and providing the bandwidth for that RSS traffic), they offer a large number of options but I think the best ones to take advantage of are MyBrand and PingShot.
MyBrand allows me to use FeedBurner, but keep the RSS feed in my domain name. Typically a FeedBurner feed would use the FeedBurner domain name (e.g. “http://www.feedburner.com/myblog”). The problem with this is that if I ever decide I don’t want to use FeedBurner any longer, I’m stuck because everyone is subscribing to that link. I’ve essentially given up control of my feed. MyBrand gets around this by allowing me to leave FeedBurner in the loop, but use my own domain name for the feed. My RSS feed is running through FeedBurner, but is still “http://feeds.bussinger.org/sbussinger”. Setting this up is a bit tricky and requires that I have detailed control over my DNS settings. I essentially delegate one of my subdomains (“feeds.bussinger.org”) to FeedBurner by creating a CNAME record in my DNS settings. I use ZoneEdit to provide my DNS services and they make it very easy to create the CNAME record (they refer to it as an “Alias”, but it’s the same thing). I put my new FeedBurner RSS Feed URL into Graffiti and it will substitute it automatically everywhere feed information is normally provided.
PingShot simply notifies several large news feed search engines and aggregators when I’ve posted new information. This should help the discoverability of the blog while costing nothing and taking no effort.
Comment Spam Protection
It’s great to allow two-way communication between blogger and readers by allowing Comments on posts. But like many things, it’s being taken advantage of by scumbags in the form of Comment Spam. Akismet is a service to help prevent comment spam. They provide free service for non-commercial blogs. To set this up in Graffiti, I simply go to the Control Panel, proceed to “Site Options” then “Comments”, and then enter my “Akismet Id”. On the Akismet website, this is referred to as an API key and I got this by signing up for a WordPress.com user account and looking in my WordPress account profile. Note that I was able to signup for a WordPress account without actually creating a WordPress blog (there’s a radio button at the bottom, and I just choose “Just a username, please”). Again, Graffiti makes this incredibly simple to take advantage of – I just paste the Akismet Id number in and save it.
So far I’ve been very impressed with Graffiti CMS. They’ve certainly made it easy to install and configure. Now I just need to do something about that drab default template …
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