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Google Analytics on wordpress.com -My findings

Posted on by Saru

Well I am sure you a have reached here after a quite a bit of search about enabling Google Analytics on your free wordpress.com blog. There is good news and bad news. The good news is that, it is possible if you have a custom domain setup on wordpress.com.  If you don’t have, you are out of luck temporarily.[you can always buy one 🙂 ].  Since this post is NOT about how to get around setting google analytics, please head over to the last paragraph for the instructions. But before you go there let me just warn you a bit about how my efforts fared at this attempt and what I gained and what I lost.

Google analytics is just awesome, and i will miss it badly. I had it for a month and it was just great.  Yes, i undid the workaround I had done a month and a few days back. The issues that I had were of page load times. Pages with a lot of images like this one that gets the most vistiors on my blog took more than 17 second to load (yes i tested them personally,  and average page load time for the same page on Google Analytics was 14secs.) Now after undoing the work around it has considerably reduced like (8 secs).

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What was surprising was a few days back when I checked I had this message popping on the site, which was nothing I had done. Well a close investigation said that it was protecting the security of my site and was put up there by cloud flare guys. Well this is a bit annoying to me in the first place, I cant even imagine how bad it would be for a user who came here due to a search engine. Should be disappointing at the very least. I am not sure what triggered this, it could have been a setting change I did or it was something default of theirs, but regardless of who is to be blamed, I don’t like it and i do not want it. The page load times and the security was more than enough for me to stop this hack around. To me happy readers matter more than the stats.So i will sacrifice the in depth stats for now.

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I am not advising you to stop from trying, i am just sharing my set of thoughts and issues. If you feel its worth the hassle, please feel free to try them from here. [I wonder why two pages for it though, cheap pageview tactics] My recommendation would be, Its better to host your own blog elsewhere [Not on wordpress.com] and have tracking. Remember there are no Free Lunches 😉 if they are they are probably not great.

 

How to publish markdown content on wordpress.com

Posted on by Saru

Please read update 2 below first to save some valuable time.

The workflow i am trying here is to compose in markdown on Markdownpad and just export the HTML into email and send it to my secret email id that will publish the post on my wordpress.com blog.[update:- now my blog is self hosted, but this workflow still works]

How i got around publishing is as follows.

  1. Enable posting by email on your blog. For more details read this post here
  2. Compose in Markdown on your favorite writing tool.
  3. Export/copy the content from the editor in HTML.
  4. Use a client like outlook or thunderbird or gmail etc and paste the copied content
  5. Use the code “[status draft]” in the email somewhere and send the email to your secret email id. Publishing directly doesnt work and shows up like this which is ugly.
  6. You should see the post appear among the drafts without much change in formatting, just “cut” the content and switch to HTML view and paste it there and preview should show your formatted post.
  7. Just publish it if everything looks fine.

This I think is the simplest and non geekier way to get markdown created content published on a wordpress.com blog,  incase you have a better way to do it feel free to share it in the comments.

UPDATE:

Here is a nice alternative method which you can try as well. Thanks to Alberto for pointing out.

UPDATE 2:
As of Nov 19th 2013 WordPress.com supports Markdown and you can enable it by following the instructions here. The above workflow is no longer required. Just enable markdown in your write setting on wordpress.com. If you still wanted to know how markdown worked on wordpress before it was enabled by default in WordPress.com, please read the full post. Thanks for reading