Algorithms for the Masses by Julian M Bucknall

After a while of using my archive calendar, the statistics for page views were starting to get really skewed in favor of the archive "post". It finally got to the point where the graph that's displayed under the Reporting tab in the Graffiti control panel had a line for archive that was 5 times longer than the nearest "real" post. Since the information about the number of people using the archive system is not that interesting to me, it was time to do something about it.

A bit of research later led me to the PostStatistic class in Graffiti.Core, in particular the Destroy() method. Since I wanted to have the ability to turn on or off the resetting of the archive stats, I decided to make the reset a Chalk extension. This meant it would become a method in my JmbCalendarHelper extension:

    public static void ResetArchivePageStatistics() {
      GraffitiContext gc = GraffitiContext.Current;
      Post post = gc["post"] as Post;
      if ((post != null) && (string.Compare(post.Name, "archive", true)) == 0){
        PostStatistic.Destroy(PostStatistic.Columns.PostId, post.Id);
      }
    }

Note that I was very careful to ensure that the post was really the archive post. Paranoid, moi? I didn't want to inadvertently reset the stats for another of my posts by mistake.

After that I added this line to the top of my cd:archive.view file:

$JmbCalendarHelper.ResetArchivePageStatistics()

so that the stats for the archive post would be reset every time the Archive Calendar system was used. In essence, they would always be zero.

I've updated the Archive Calendar page on CodePlex with this new release (v1.01).

Posts on similar topics...

• Writing an Archive Calendar, part 4b
• Making the Calendar into a Graffiti CMS Widget
• Writing an Archive Calendar, part 1