On 08/29/2013 11:17 AM, Martin van den Bemt wrote:
I don't know what your background is, but I assume you are a bigikin
Google Analyitcs fan/user. There are lot's of people who don't care
about Google Analytics and I am one of them.
Well, a Google Search is showing that you haven't used Roller since
2004: http://weblog.isallineed.net/javagui/ so you're speaking
hypothetically. But yes, like the heavy majority of website owners and
bloggers today, I use Google Analytics. If you ever tried Google
Analytics, you'll easily see how its orders of magnitude above what we
presently have for Roller, we can't remotely compete with them and we
don't need to try anyway. If there's "lots of people" who don't like
Google Analytics, that's fine, they can link in a competitor of GA
instead--there's plenty of those too.
While WordPress does keep these types of stats
(http://en.support.wordpress.com/stats/#referrers), we don't have the
resources right now to compete with them in this area (and I suspect
with WordPress, an increasing number of those too go to GA). It's
better to have *nothing* and to refer people to mighty fine GA than to
continue to show something painfully substandard. There is precedent for
this, when you create a free website via Weebly, they give you the
opportunity to type in a Google Analytics or other key rather than try
to duplicate GA's functionality, and IIRC Google Blogger also doesn't
bother with duplicating GA.
If we're going to provide a referral tab, it's got to be professional
enough so we don't look bad against the present alternatives. Not the
chintzy reset-every-24-hours-back-to-zero referrals tab that we have
now. That page is not acceptable in its present state, but the presence
of GA and other alternatives today means the demand for it is so reduced
that limited resources should remain with other screens instead.
So if you remove your Google Analytics argument, the only motivation
to remove that code is because it reduces database space and memory
needs to make it cheaper to deploy ?
I don't see why we should be removing the Google Analytics argument, as
no rational person can claim the Roller referral tab is better. But
besides memory and database consumption, there are also the standard
benefits that come from having a smaller codebase plus how the product
improves overall when you remove substandard-looking pages.
As a compromise, perhaps we can keep the background processes collecting
the referrals (so they can be used in themes as Dave mentions), but, in
my view, that referral tab needs to go until it is something that does
not look substantially worse than Wordpress' or GA's offerings. I still
don't see the need to reproduce Google Analytics within Roller
however--the fact that some people dislike Google can be met by having
people linking in other third party referral tools. Again, in its
present state, those who really care about referrals will not be looking
at that tab anyway, they'll be using GA or one of its competitors.
Regards,
Glen
Mvgr,
Martin
2013/8/27 Glen Mazza <[email protected]>:
Hi Team, Roller trunk still maintains a "Referrers" page for each blog
created, which gives a list of external sites which had someone click on a
link taking the person to the Roller blog. This list is maintained for 24
hours only, resetting to zero at the end of each day. This information is
populated from a database table and a background process that writes all
incoming referrers to that table.
Nowadays people who are interested in that information use free Google
Analytics, which is soooooo much better (stores data for months for free),
and I see no reason for us to reinvent the wheel by trying to duplicate
their service. Those who don't care about this information won't be on
Google Analytics, but they won't be caring about that Referrer page either,
so that page really isn't helping anyone today.
So I'd like to pull out the Referrer page and move the unrelated Blog Hit
reset button on that page to the Maintenance page. Also, remove the
background process and related classes involved with writing to the referrer
table, and update the User Guide mentioning Google Analytics. We won't have
a referrer table anymore in 5.1, and the 5.0-to-5.1 migration script will
just ignore the 5.0 referrer table, so it will sit dormant in 5.1
installations. By removing the SQL processes related to storing the
referrers, it will help speed up Roller while reducing database space and
memory needs, making it easier and cheaper to deploy on ISPs/PaaSs.
WDYT?
Regards,
Glen
