Rocket Surgery

I was messing with the Google Web Toolkit yesterday. My friend Jeff is a big fan of it, and he is actually using it for a Navy system that I once worked on. He’s gotten a couple of his coworkers on the bandwagon, so I started messing with it.

If you don’t know, GWT is a tool for creating AJAX applications. You write code in Java, and the GWT compiler translates it into Javascript instead of byte code. Separating the client side from the server side is built in, and they have done things to simplify RPC calls back to the server from the client.

First thing I liked is that the installation is dead easy. Download a zip file, explode it somewhere, and to make things simple, add it to your execution path. There is nice eclipse integration too. Adding and removing widgets (UI elements) from the page was also dead easy, and hooking up listeners to react when things are messed with was a breeze.
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I have been playing with Google Analytics the past few days. It’s an extremely cool web monitoring system, with great graphs and such. Shame it’s so poorly documented and sometimes doesn’t work.

Installing GA is really simple - you sign up and get an account, which gives you a unique id number for the site(s) you want to monitor. You can have many ID’s per GA account. Once you have the id, you paste the supplied script into the bottom of each page you want to monitor. The script looks something like this:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-#######-#"; // your site id goes here
urchinTracker();
</script>

All very well and good, except when I tried putting this piece of code into the footer of my Wordpress site, Google Analytics says it can’t find the code, when it’s definitely there when I do a view source on the page. Just to make sure it wasn’t some sort of Javascript thing, I even pulled up the page using Telnet, and I can see the script there. Can’t find any fixes for this on the web, either. Pity, too, because Google Analytics is something I’d really like to use.