It’s taken way too long to do but I’ve finally fixed a bunch of issues people have been experiencing. In fact, this was supposed to just be a bug release but I got a little carried away with the design and added in a couple overdue features.

First, The Bugs

To be blunt, there were a couple nasty bugs in 0.3 that pretty much ruined the experience for a lot of people. I’m sorry for that. I swear, it worked on my blog 😊

Anyway, the bugs that were fixed include 2 that prevented the system from tracking (Gary) and a bug that pretty much destroyed a users blog (Joerg) plus a one that prevented the comment body from being parsed as well as a couple spelling issues.

The Gary bug prevented the tracker from working because of a simple pathing issue. I didn’t take into account that people might have their blog in a sub-directory of the domain so my calls were going to the ether instead of the WordPress installation. So, you know, my bad…

The Joreg bug was a little more insidious and harder to track down though. It basically consisted of a couple issues, that when combined, caused a memory failure on the users blog. This is pretty much the worst case scenario when developing for other people (to destroy the system) and I, unfortunately, didn’t experience this myself so it only became apparent on other peoples blogs. This one bugged the shit out of me.

To fix I had to take content from Joreg’s blog and add it to my system. After I did that my computer instantly burst into flames. I didn’t know that was even possible but there you go…

The actual cause of the bug came from 3 different causes:

1. Email (mailto:) links
2. Anchor (#top) links
3. Missing (empty hrefs) links

Turns out that my regex skills were lacking because I didn’t account for any of the above. To fix I just added checking for those types of links to the parser and am ignoring them for now. This is a no brainer for the missing and anchor links (why would you want to track those?) but I can see a reasonable argument for wanting to track mailto links.  I’ll be working on getting that working with the next release.

The comment parsing bug was easily fixed by changing the parse priority in the Wordpress hook to a higher level than 1. This was an issue because WordPress uses it’s own plugin system to create links placed into comments to href links automagically so when I was parsing the href wasn’t created yet. I went with a priority of 9 and it worked great.

Now, The Features

So, while I was trying to figure out the Joerg bug I got a little motivated and started work on a couple new features no really asked for but I felt the system could use. The biggest is a mod to add links for external distribution. If I’m going to be honest, this really started as a bit of  a copout on my part. I originally wanted the entire experience to be seemless to the user so they wouldn’t have to go through the pain of manually adding links to the system but with all the problems people were having with the parser and me not being able to figure it as fast as I wanted I thought having a fallback mechanism to add links made sense. It should be noted that this decision was made at 3AM after a night on the town.

Like most coding decisions made while, ahem…”comfortable”, this mod required more work than I initially thought. I don’t want to bore with the technical crap but suffice it to say  a HUGE refactoring was required so I wouldn’t gouge my eyes out while working on the plugin. Technical debt, you’ve got to pay the price at some point…

I also built in a little configuration panel so blog owners can explicitly state what portions of the code they want to parse and which they don’t. This was, again, meant as a stop gap for the Joerg bug with the idea being that blog owners could lower the parsing coverage if performance issues came up.

And that’s 0.4. I hope this one goes better than 0.3 but I have no idea at this point. I did include the activation monitor so I can keep an eye on how many times it’s activated and/or deactivated so I’ll find out in about a week if people are actually using the plugin.

In the meantime, if anyone experiences any bugs or issues, no matter how small, please don’t hesitate to post a comment on the official WP-Click-Track 0.4 page.