google_analytics gem problems

rubyonrails-talk
1

I've honestly never had any serious issues with a gem under RoR until now!

I installed mark catley's google analytics plugin (http://github.com/ markcatley/google_analytics/tree/master) and it doesn't seem to work at al! I have the gem in my environments.rb (I am running Rails 2.1), and it is installed. But it is like it is not loaded in. There is no call added and if I try and hand add an after_filter to call add_google_analytics_code I get a no such method error.

Has anyone used this gem?

2

A few things to check:

1) If you're testing in development, make sure your config/ initializers/analytics.rb file includes a line like this:

Rubaidh::GoogleAnalytics.environments = ['production', 'development']

(By default, the Analytics code is only added in the production environment)

2) Make sure that you're testing with a page that goes through a layout with <body><body> tags - the code depends on seeing the body tags to know where to insert code. Don't be fooled by "view source" showing you body tags that aren't really there if you're simply rendering a view without a layout.

3) You may want to pick up from the master repo at http://github.com/rubaidh/google_analytics/tree/master , which I believe is somewhat more up-to-date than Mark Catley's branch.

I just ran a test using the current master code as a gem in a Rails 2.10 app, and it worked fine for me.

3

Thanks Mike!

I installed the code from git://github.com/rubaidh/google_analytics.git as a plugin and that seemed to work. Using it as a gem I had no success... how did you do it?

Now the question is, is it any better than just having the code in a partial and dropping it at the bottom of my layout?!

4

All I did was add the line to the config file, run rake gems:install, and run with it. So I'm not sure why you had issues with the gem approach.

As to whether it's better than just dropping static code in through a partial - that depends, I think, on whether you need to use any of the other capabilities of the plugin. If all you need to do is just hook pages into Google Analytics, the partial approach is fine. The two areas where I've found the plugin most useful are (1) The helpers that let me use link_to_tracked and so on to easily get outgoing link tracking (2) The overrides to claim a different site/path for different pages when making the call back to Google (I'm using that heavily on a server where one Rails app serves multiple sites).

Of course, since I wrote a bunch of that code, I'm prejudiced.

Mike

5

Ok, The line in the readme, though, installs the mark catley one... so I guess what I am asking is what line exactly did you add!

6

I used Mark's branch when testing the gem integration; he's the one who's been working on that part of the code. I mainly run with the plugin myself, though.

Mike

7

I added http://gems.github.com to my gem sources, then did a 'gem list -r | grep analytics', which only turned out the markcatley-google_analytics (1.0.20080720) version.

Following the instructions here (http://github.com/rubaidh/google_analytics/tree/master#) and using 'rake gems:install' tells me that the gem does not exist.

Hmmm. So I tried installing the markcatley version 'gem install markcatley-google_analytics', which goes ok, but when I add 'require 'rubaidh/google_analytics' to my application controller and then 'Rubaidh::GoogleAnalytics.tracker_id = 'xxxx'' to the bottom of environment.rb I get a 500 Server Error with nothing in my development log.

How exactly am I supposed to use this gem? I can't find any information anywhere which works, though if there is then please tell me where.

Alternatively how am I supposed to install it as a plugin? All the sources I can find on the net to pass to script/plugin install seem to be dead, or old code (not the latest google javascript).

Thanks,

Chris