98 replies to this topic

[1dmf]

I learnt Perl, purely through chance, plus PHP wasn't really a full blown language back then it was still just "Phil's Home Page".

Basically I was interested in creating a website, so I taught myself, then I wanted to add a chat room, one I found was written in perl.

As my hosting at the time was linux and was CGI capable, I installed the perl chat as perl is a CGI language, but I soon wanted it to do more, add new features, etc.. So I read the source code and played about, guessing what things did, and basically taught myself by trial and error.

I then was required to put my skills into practice for my employer , so I hammered the Tek-Tips forum and was slowly taught to do things properly by experts.

I'm by no means a perl professional, but I have certainly built up quite a skill, and at the end of the day I like the language and its syntax, it really is a nice scripting language.

I keep humming and harring over learning PHP, or even .NET , but I still use perl everyday, as I can get things done in it.

Perl is quite old and is not likely to be around for the long hall, PHP was originally written in perl.

The need to learn it in your case is unlikely, as you have PHP and that is more common these days.

What makes you feel you should learn it? or want to? If it's just coz you feel like it , then go for it, i'll be more than happy to help where I can.

If it's for commercial reasons, to further your carrer, well I've never seen a job advert for web developement requiring perl, have you ?

Edited by 1dmf, 20 November 2009 - 12:23 PM.

[1dmf]

Ohhh I think we have a winner! It didn't work at first, but that was my mistake in putting the javascript call in my file wrong.

Glad you got it working Jill, Your JS error has now gone

I had the same problem when I first installed (hence me writting the workaround).

Let us know if you need anything, but if it's PHP related, Randy is your best bet.

Edited by 1dmf, 20 November 2009 - 06:44 PM.

[tomsk]

I have taken a look at this a couple of time now and does not that easy to figure out (not a criticism) and observation.

Have you a muppets install guide I could look at?

[Jill]

I could probably write that muppets guide...you're right, the directions are not so straight forward, but after all these years I've figured out the way Randy thinks!

[1dmf]

Have you a muppets install guide I could look at?

only the current readme files i'm afraid. I guess a step-by-step guide would be handy, were you volunteering Jill?

[Randy]

Go for it Jill. I'll even roll your muppets guide into the doanload package. Goodness knows I'm probably too tech oriented to pen one of those.

To answer your question from yesterday, it's been a month or so since I ran a comparison for the percentage of GRE-enabled vs Normal Google referrals. I probably need to run one again soon. The last time I ran one of those reports against my own sites log files the percentage was up to roughly 13% of all Google hits carrying the special referral url. That was around the end of Sept.

[Jill]

Randy, do you have any thoughts as to which queries get tagged? Do you think it's totally random? Or would certain types of queries or certain types of pages tend to have the rank appended?

Also, would it be a simple change to allow the program to show all queries even without the rank? I'm really liking having that real time ability to see what people came into the site from, without having to wait a day or some hours. Just a quick easy snapshot.

I know there are a zillion other stats packages that do this, but if it's just another line of code or something it could be helpful.

[Randy]

do you have any thoughts as to which queries get tagged?

It's completely random on the user and search query side of things Jill. Whether a particular user or search gets the special referral url depends entirely upon which datacenter someone gets connected to. Some have it enabled, some don't.

Also, would it be a simple change to allow the program to show all queries even without the rank?

Yup, it's easy to do.

Open the gredb.php config file. By default this one is in the /gre/ folder. At the bottom of this file change $req_pos_data = "true"; to read $req_pos_data = "false";. Upload the change to your server and you'll now be recording every Google referral.

The "normal" hits with no ranking position will show up with a position of 0.

FTR, I have actually given some thought to changing the default setting on this one to change it from true to false so that it records all Google hits. Then I was going to tweak the Position section of the admin form to put a checkbox in there that'll simply exclude the No Position hits from the displayed results. The main reason I've thought about changing it is that it would give everyone an easy way to run a little query that'll tell you what percentage of hits contain ranking position data.

It's on my To Do list and something I planned on doing this weekend for my own test sites. If you want this tweak for your installation let me know. It should be a quickie update since it's only an admin template update.

[Jill]

I see you had that option already there in that file, didn't notice it before.

And yeah, adding that option on the admin form would be good. Seems like that would be an easy html tweak which I can make myself if you know offhand what the form option code would be that I'd need to add.

[Randy]

Quick hit.

Attached is a zip file with a couple of tweaks to make the No Rank Position (or nrp in my parlance) data easier to include or exclude. The two files in the zip are meant to replace two files of the same name that live in your GRE admin subdirectory, which by default is /gre/.

Steps to apply the update:

• Check the gredb.php file in your GRE Admin directory to make sure the $req_pos_data variable is set to "false". If it is set to "true" none of the nrp hits will be recorded to the database, so the new tweak won't actually do anything.
• Make a backup copy or simply rename the current index.php and gre_ajax.php files in the GRE Admin subdirectory, just in case. This is an untested update after all.
• Unzip the attached zip file and upload those two files over the ones currently on your server.

Usage:

It's pretty simple. A new field has been added to the admin form. It's a simple Yes or No choice and only appears in the admin form when $req_pos_data is set to false.

Or if you want to see only referrals that include the ranking position info select Yes in this new NRP options box, which is the default action.

If you want the GRE results to show you all Google referred hits change the NRP choice to No. Those hits that don't include any ranking data will show as a Position of 0 (zero) in the results. The rest will display as normal.

With these changes in essence all Google referred hits will be saved to the database. That's what changing $req_pos_data to false does. The new form field simply lets you decide if you want to include them in the dataset or not at the moment you're running a stats report.

The only downside to this tweak is that your database is going to grow a lot larger a lot faster. That's because more hits are going to be recorded. Which is an acceptable trade off. Besides, if you don't want to ever use this functionality you can still simply set $req_pos_data to be true and those hits will not be saved to the database.

It's a quick and dirty update that's only available here for now. If I can find a few moments this weekend I'll add a bit more functionality and upload it to the normal repository on my blog. The other update I have in mind is to put a little routine in place that will allow you to easily see the percentage of hits received with the ranking position info included on your own site. That way nobody will have to guess. It'll just be there when you run a report as long as you've got things configured to record those nrp hits.

Attached Files

•  nrp.zip   4.57K   21 downloads

[Randy]

FYI, I have the additional tweaks done to report the percentages when the conditions are right. I'm going to let it run on a couple of my sites overnight though to make sure it's reporting accurately. I'll release it tomorrow if everything looks okay then.

[tomsk]

Hi Randy

I may be missing the point so forgive me - you appear to have a great script here but it kinda flies in the face of what you promote on the forum.

I have taken a look at the demo link on your site and it makes it no clearer either , I accept that you may not be doing the script for commercial gain etc but its a shame that it's not as easy to understand for the less tech savvy.

Again I may be missing the purpose of you making the script, however I suspect it was for as many people to use as possible.

Just me 2 cents.

[piskie]

Thanks for all the hard work on this Randy, I have been running your PHP version for some months now and it is proving to be a real time saver. It's a fantastic signpost to the lower position entries that occasionally show up and had never occurred to me. These can then be focused on and exploited.

Just one little question, have you fixed (or thinking of) the query termination at characters such as in my particular case &
I get search terms containing B & B truncated and some are quite long tailed so vital geographic or other info is missing from the search query. This pertains to a couple of tourism sites where accommodation searches frequently contain Bed & Breakfast or B & B.

Cheeky, I know, but is there any chance.

[Jill]

I get search terms containing B & B truncated and some are quite long tailed so vital geographic or other info is missing from the search query.

I wonder if that's why I sometimes get what seem to be queries on just the letter "F" and things like that?

Thanks for the update, Randy! Will install those new files asap!

I have taken a look at the demo link on your site and it makes it no clearer either

Tom, I might be able to help. I'm pretty good at translating geek speak into English.

The first thing you need to be able to do before you can do anything, is be able to add a mysql database on your server. Do you know if you can do that? Not all hosting plans allow this, or you have to ask your server support people to do it.

[tomsk]

The first thing you need to be able to do before you can do anything, is be able to add a mysql database on your server. Do you know if you can do that? Not all hosting plans allow this, or you have to ask your server support people to do it.

Yep no problem doing that - just set one up ready for install.