Google Analytics Automator breaks iWeb blog comments

Hi
I added a blog for our Small Business site that I created with iWeb. We used Google Analytics and the Automator script add the HTML snippet to track visits on our site. Since I added the blog I realized that after running the GA automator script the "Add a comment" link disappears.
Kinda defeats the purpose of the blog. I have to choose between tracking how many visitors have been on the blog, or visitors posting comments, but I can't have both. How can I fix this and track how many visitors were on our site, and have a blog where visitors can leave comments? Any ideas and solutions would be most welcome. Thanks,
Zoltan

Unfortunately, as you have discovered, inserting Google Analytics into your site requires post editing. This means that you cannot just publish directly to MobileMe from iWeb - to insert the analytics you need to publish to a folder, insert and then place the Blog directly on your iDisk - unfortunately, this way you loose the features that your iWeb blog provides when published directly to MME - i.e. Blog comments.
Do you have an ordinary website too or is it just a blog? If you have an ordinary website, what some people do, including myself, is set up a blog with WordPress, E-blogger, or http://www.posterous.com and link to it from your iWeb site.
If you are just after setting up a blog on its own without a site, then I would suggest you look at http://www.wordpress.com, http://www.eblogger.com or posterous (link provided). You can set up a blog with any template you like and can add entries on line at any time, rather than being limited to updating with the domain.sites file as you are with iWeb.
In WordPress, you can also add as many pages as you like, so you can effectively have a website as well as a blog, so the other alternatives might be a better bet than iWeb and I think they have their own built in analytics too.

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Google Analytics breaks iWeb blog comments

Does anybody know a workaround for Google Analytics' breaking of iWeb blog comments? Apparently, from some posts I've read, StatCounter and other traffic stat services break iWeb blog comments, too... so it's apparently an iWeb issue rather than a Google Analytics issue. FWIW, I'm publishing to my MobileMe personal domain. Thanks in advance!

I found a decent way of adding Google Analytics to all pages, without using HTML Snippits (which cause analytics to track those odd page names like widget2_markup.html), that doesn't break MobileMe comments, and doesn't require any post-processing of your iWeb site. Just Publish and go! Open up your iWeb app bundle, and drill down to Contents/Resources/Scripts/Site. Open up the file iWebSite.js in TextEdit (or your favorite text editor), and paste the following at the bottom of the file:
// Begin Google Analytics
gaTrackerId = 'ss-ddddddd-d'; // insert your tracker id here
document.observe('dom:loaded', function() {
var gaJsHost = ( ('https:' == document.location.protocol) ? 'https://ssl.' : 'http://www.') + 'google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var script = new Element('script', { 'src': gaJsHost});
var gaTrack = function() {
if (
!script.readyState
|| /loaded|complete/.test(script.readyState)
var pageTracker = gat.getTracker(gaTrackerId);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
script.observe('load', gaTrack);
script.observe('readystatechange', gaTrack);
document.body.appendChild(script);
// End Google Analytics
Credit to this solution goes to this blog post. I got the idea to find a way of using Google Analytics in Prototype (since iWeb sites use the Prototype JavaScript framework) and found that blog snippit.
And yes, since this is editing the iWeb application bundle, you may need to reapply this hack if/when iWeb is updated. Hopefully though, some enterprising iWeb engineer is reading this and will add proper Google Analytics support to iWeb for us.

Problems with Blog Comments after running Google Analytics Automator

I upgraded to IWeb 09 today and was hoping that there would be not too many compatibility issues. Well, here is one.
I noticed that the comment function on my blog page kept disappearing after I published the website to MobileMe. After some hours of trial and error I found out that the comment function is there right after publishing but disappears straight after running the Google Analytics Automator on the Idisk website folder.
I don't think I had this problem with IWeb 08 (I only used it briefly), so that might be a compatibility issue with IWeb 09.
Anybody else had this problem? Any suggestions?

After some hours of trial and error I found out that the comment function is there right after publishing but disappears straight after running the Google Analytics Automator on the Idisk website folder.
this is a known problem since from iweb1, any time you post edit your pages (with google analytics automator or what not) you potentially cripple MMe server side functions.
search iweb1 and iweb2 forum for more details.

Does iweb SEO tool from Rage replace the Google Analytics Automator?

Until now, I ran Google Analytics Automator on my website which is saved in a local folder on my hard drive, then republished the site so that my results (visits, page views, etc.) will show up in Google Analytics reports. I just bought the iweb SEO Tool so that I can add keywords so my site will get better traffic. It asks for Googles UA number. Does this mean that the iWeb SEO Tool replaces the Automator tool I previously used so that I don't need to use the Automator tool each time I make a change and republish my site? If I do both, what happens?

SEO Tool will apply analytics to all the pages of the site with one click.
http://www.iwebformusicians.com/Search-Engine-Optimization/Tags.html
There's not a lot of point in adding analytics twice!

Using Google Analytics with .Mac/iWeb

Does anybody know how to embed the Google snippet into iWeb pages?

Not so simple.
Doing this will give confusing results as the widget markup is recorded as well.
To avoid this you have to add the code post publishing and this is not very convenient for .Mac users - especially those who need blog comments etc.
If you are using Leopard you can make life a lot easier by using this application...
http://www.zarrastudios.com/ZDS/iWebBuddy.html
.... and I'm sure you'll find an apple script to do the same thing.

Does iWeb blogging (comments, etc.) only work when published to .Mac?

The subject says it all, but I was wondering how well the blog features of iWeb work when publishing to a non-.Mac host.
Right now I use WordPress for my blog. Is iWeb's blog feature a reasonable alternative?
doug

The iWeb features which are .Mac only are: Direct one-step uploading, Password protection, Hit counter, Slideshow with viewing controls, and Blog Comments/Searching.

Iweb blog comments

Hi people,
Could somebody help me?
i have published my site at www.dubkasm.com and used a blog page as a comments book, only when i publish the site there is no section like 'add comment' or 'post message'. How can i do this? Any help much appreciated!
Cheers,
Ben (Brazil)

Try searching the forum as this has been covered before.
As far as I can remeber Blog comments created through iWeb are stored server side on .Mac somewhere, so exporting your site to another domain, other than .Mac, will make comments inactive.

Problem with iWeb SEO breaking iWeb blogs (Blog Summary Widget error).

As as happened to many others, my blog was broken. The only thing that showed up when publishing was "Blog Summary Widget", no actual blog.
I came on here and searched, uninstalled with apzapper, deleted preferences before that, tried everything.
Still the problem.
Then I notice my blog works. I'm excited. I move on in my post iweb part of the process (iWeb SEO and dreamweaver edits) to then see it's broken again.
After some testing (changing 1 file at a time, one step at a time) I found that when iWeb SEO touched the home.html (where my blog is) it broke it.
This is a new phenomenon as I was doing this all the time before with no problem.
I even tried updating to the latest version of iWeb SEO and the same problem.
So if you're having this problem, and are using iWeb SEO, try it without and see if you still have the same problem.

I'm getting the same problem too. I've just updated my iWeb from 1 to 2. I've had to more or less re-create my Blog from scratch as the upgrade wrecked the summary and recent items pages (probably because I'd use jTemplate).
So I created a new Site, dragged the old blog over to it and created a brand new one in my proper site. I then copied all my formatting over AND all the entries. All looks fine in iWeb, but I see the same error messages as described here. Take a look here : http://www.andrewmay.biz/test/
Obviously I've moved a lot of stuff around from the normal White template, and deleted a few things too, but I would have hoped that iWeb wouldn't let me trash things that then broke it.

Iweb'09 blog comments and google analytics

My apologies if this has been asked before.
My blog no longer allows comments. This occurred when I used the Automator program to add google analytics to my site. The good news is that google analytics does work. I host the site on mobile me so I have 2 questions
(1) Is there a way to get google analytics to work and allow blog comments within a moble me hosted site?
if not, how can I remove google analytics to restore the blog comment capability and is there a monitoring package available within the mobile me world?
thanks

I had the same problem. From the little research I've done it appears that you can't have the comments on and run GA at the same time. I have seen some messages on here that claimed to move a picture on the pages that had comments in order to restore the ones that were lost. I didn't have any luck with it.
Here's and interesting site that references it in the comments section.
http://allaboutiweb.com/index.php/2009/01/why-use-google-analytics-iweb/

Google analytics breaks youtube movies

Hi,
I have a couple of youtube videos on my website, but after starting using Google analytics, adding it with an automator action, the youtube videos does not show up on my site, only a blank space.
Anyone know how to solve this?

I found a decent way of adding Google Analytics to all pages, without using HTML Snippits (which cause analytics to track those odd page names like widget2_markup.html), that doesn't break MobileMe comments, and doesn't require any post-processing of your iWeb site. Just Publish and go! Open up your iWeb app bundle, and drill down to Contents/Resources/Scripts/Site. Open up the file iWebSite.js in TextEdit (or your favorite text editor), and paste the following at the bottom of the file:
// Begin Google Analytics
gaTrackerId = 'ss-ddddddd-d'; // insert your tracker id here
document.observe('dom:loaded', function() {
var gaJsHost = ( ('https:' == document.location.protocol) ? 'https://ssl.' : 'http://www.') + 'google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var script = new Element('script', { 'src': gaJsHost});
var gaTrack = function() {
if (
!script.readyState
|| /loaded|complete/.test(script.readyState)
var pageTracker = gat.getTracker(gaTrackerId);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
script.observe('load', gaTrack);
script.observe('readystatechange', gaTrack);
document.body.appendChild(script);
// End Google Analytics
Credit to this solution goes to this blog post. I got the idea to find a way of using Google Analytics in Prototype (since iWeb sites use the Prototype JavaScript framework) and found that blog snippit.
And yes, since this is editing the iWeb application bundle, you may need to reapply this hack if/when iWeb is updated. Hopefully though, some enterprising iWeb engineer is reading this and will add proper Google Analytics support to iWeb for us.

Using Google Analytics with iWeb site

Is it possible to use Google Analytics with an iWeb site? They have code they want me to put before the </body> tag.... and I can't find that tag. How do I get the code to show in iWeb? Can I insert this with an HTML snippet?
Thanks!

Hello ruralart,
After saving the automator workflow as a Finder Plugin,
mount you iDisk in the finder (ex. click on the iDisk icon in the left pane of a Finder window),
goto the folder iDisk / Web / Sites , select this folder "sites",
control-click on the folder to run the “Add Google Analytics” workflow.
Note : when you have iDisk Sync = ON, you'll see that the folder "web" is an alias so Automator will not work in this situation. You'll have to turn iDisk Sync OFF.
Kind regards,
Leo

Google Analytics for iweb 09 site published to MobileMe

At one point I was able to add Google Analytics to my iweb site that's on Mobile Me. That lasted 2 days, till I republished it. I redid it twice, I thought the same way. The last time was yesterday after changing to new iweb 09 software. I published site to local disk (idisk), then went to Automator and added the Google Analytics code (UA-xxxxxxx-x) again and unchecked "Old Style Analytics Code". I saved as a new "Google Analytics plugin". Then I selected website folder on idisk through Finder. Then control-clicked (to run Google Analytics workflow) and chose the "Google Analytics plugin" from menu. After this, I went back to my site in iweb and clicked on "Publish". I assumed that it published the site in idisk, where I had added Google Analytics. But it's been over 24 hours and no results in Google Analytics.
Through Safari, I went to home page of site, then clicked View, then page source and I don't see the Google Analytics code (UA-xxxxxxx-x) shown so it didn't seem to work. I just don't know where I made a mistake. I don't think its because I changed to iweb 09 because I re-did it the same way in iweb 08 (but did not uncheck the "Old Style Analytics Code") and it didn't work then either. Can't figure out how I got it to work for two days when I first tried it.
Please help. Anyone?

It is now easier than ever. You don't need an outside application, or an automator action at all. I used to use Transmit to upload my site, since I first had to export it to a folder, then run the automator action. I again spent some time looking for how to do it for iWeb 09 and found the easiest (and therefore overlooked) way:
1. in iWeb, create an HTML snippet
2. Copy the Google Analytics code and paste into the snippet.
3. Make the box as small as it can go (although this does not really matter since nothing will display on your site)
4. Copy this snippet and go on each page on your site and paste it.
5. Publish your site.
6. It will take a little bit of time for it to show up on the Google Analyics page, so set it up, then walk aawy for a little bit.
This worked for me right away, and I no longer have to export to a folder and use an action of any kind.

Techie Question about iWeb, outbound links, and Google Analytics

Hi,
I have a kind of pretty technical question about using Google Analytics (GA) with iWeb sites to measure clicks on outbound links. Here's the setup:
1) My website's online, and GA is working properly.
2) I don't sell stuff directly, but I do have a "Purchase" page which contains a link to a specific Amazon page.
3) I'm pretty sure I can measure how many people go to the Purchase page using GA, but how do I measure whether visitors click on the Amazon link? It would be interesting to me to be able to gauge what the conversion rate is; that is, how many people actually proceed to purchase the product at Amazon.
I've checked the GA instructions and there's a page about manually tracking clicks on outbound links but it requires some code inputting. I know zero about coding, but I'm pretty sure that in iWeb you can't get access to the source code to input the required code.
Am I wrong about this? And if I am, then does anyone here know how to measure the clickthrough rate?
Anyway, hope you can help. Thanks in advance.

I don't know about the link tracking but you could have the link take you to a redirect page which automatically sends them to Amazon.com after a preset time, 0 seconds to whatever you'd like. You can put a counter on that redirect page, like StatCounter. StatCounter can tell you how many, from where they came, i.e country and area, repeat visits, etc.
Tutorials #12 & #13 describe how to put a visible counter on a page but with a redirect page you wouldn't have to bother since it wouldn't be seen. You can get all of your information from your account on the StatCounter site.
The redirect page would be a simple plain text page titled redirect.html and would look like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh"
content="0; Destination URL">
<title>Redirecting or whatever you'd like to appear at the top of the browser</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
0 Is the number of seconds to wait before redirecting the visitor. If set to zero the visitor would not know they were being redirected. Replace Destination URL with the Amazon URL you want them to go to.
OT

Directions for adding Google Analytics and Verifying Webmaster

If you publish to mobile me:
Here you go
I have google analytics and webmaster tools now set up on my blog. I used Iweb Buddy to accomplish putting the google analytics on my site. Here are the steps.
I publish my blog to mobile me but have my own domain name. http://decorateagarden.com/
1. Set up an account at Google
2. Go to analytics and add your blog
3. This will give you a UA #
4. Purchase and install something like Iweb Buddy
5. Open Iweb Buddy and follow their instructions to add the UA# from google to Iweb Buddy
6. Process your blog pages from Iweb Buddy as this puts the google analytics code on your blog. Note!, this is not the same thing as publishing you blog from Iweb. This is called processing and is done from Iweb Buddy right on your computer.
7. Each time you publish an update on your site, you must also process that update on Iweb Buddy. You won't have to process the whole site--just the pages you published.
To get your blog verified for Webmaster tools on Google for Iweb,( you have to be able to access your server and prove you own your Iweb site)
1. Go to your account at Google
2. Go to webmaster tools
3. add your blog
4. choose upload as html
5. take the code it gives you---exactly---( I uploaded to a saved document file and removed the
-1 my computer had attached to it and then copy and pasted it before I uploaded that code to my website folder in Idisk)
6. put it in the sites folder for your site on your Idisk
7. Go back to google and hit verify
8. If it doesn't verify on google
9. you entered the code wrong on Idisk
I actually had to hit verify about 10 times to get it right. I kept entering the code wrong on Idisk but I am new to all this Iweb stuff.
When it verifies, a new page on google loads.
I hope this helps someone. Wishing you all the best with your sites.
If anyone has a good way to index my whole site from my welcome page...I'd sure like to hear it. I mean without adding Google ads.

I'm no longer publishing every page to Iweb buddy. Now that my google analytics code is picked up on my site---I just insert( the google analytics code) it into an html code on any any new pages I create right from Iweb and put it on my sidebar of those new pages and it works when I publish to mobile me. My pages are appearing in my google analytics just fine now on analytics. My site is appearing in Google search as it should.

Google Analytics and Publishing Via FTP

This may have been asked here before but, is there any way to ad google analytics to an iweb site that is published within iweb Via FTP? I haven't found any way to do it yet. Is there any way to do it with out using an external FTP program

Hello and welcome.
To add Analytics (assuming you already have the code from Google) you must publish your IWeb created site to a folder on your hard drive first.
Use a tool like IWEB SEO TOOL (Here: http://www.ragesw.com/products/iweb-seo-tool.html) and after applying the code to all your HTML pages upload your website FTP.
You will have to reapply the code everytime you make a change and republish your website.
Thierry

Google Analytics Automator breaks iWeb blog comments

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