This morning a light bulb went off. At last! I had an event to Twitter about.

I packed up my trusty laptop and off I went to Living in Full Bloom: A Celebration of Cancer Survivorship. Not only that, I checked Twitter on my iPhone just in case wireless wasn’t working.

As the crowd of 500 or so settled down, I started up as discreetly as I could. Of course, how discreet can one be when yours is the only laptop at the event?

Following an invocation, Ruth McGinnis, an ovarian cancer survivor, pulled out her violin and together with her band, launched into a gorgeous melody — St. Anne’s Reel. I feebly tweeted again, but when she started to tell the story of her cancer, I just couldn’t do it any more. It felt disrespectful. I would be horrified if someone Twittered in a church service. And while there were photographers and a video crew, nonetheless this had more in common with church than a media event. She spoke from her heart of living with cancer, and the crowd responded, creating a patchwork of deeply touching stories.

So have I now resolved my Twitter dilemna? Does this mean I can now safely dispense with it? Alas, no. Life is messy. As I was getting ready to Twitter earlier in the day, I happened on a tweet by Barack Obama,: “Thanking Hillary. Our party & our country are stronger because of the work she has done.” I followed the link and it led me to a form where I too could (and did) thank Senator Clinton. This is Web 2.0 at its best.

And I’m still lost in Twitterland.

Getting Drupal up and running involves a few squirrelly first steps that will literally either make or break your new site. At times they work like a charm. Everything falls right into place and your site is up and running in a matter of minutes. At other times, your head is at risk of a bloodying from banging it into the desk. If you are setting Drupal up on Pair.com and, like me, aren’t an Apache and Unix adept, you are at risk of the blood-on-head scenario. So to save your noggin, here is what I have learned over the last few days, using a combo of trial-and-error and talking to the good people in Pair.com support.

Trap number 1. Your database server is not the default localhost. This one is actually easy. On the “Database configuration” page the trick is to click the rather subtle “Advanced options” link near the bottom of the page. Then you can enter the name of the server.

Trap number 2. Register_globals needs to be disabled. To do this, set up an .htaccess file, and add the following code:

php_value register_globals Off

Trap number 3. Your system configuration does not support clean URLs. You could just ignore this one, but increasingly friendly URLs are seen as a basic site need. To do this, you have to expand the .htaccess file. Replace the one line in step two with the following more comprehensive code (where XXX is the path of your Drupal site if it’s not in the root):

<IfModule mod_php5.c>
  php_value magic_quotes_gpc 0
  php_value register_globals 0
  php_value session.auto_start 0
  php_value mbstring.http_input pass
  php_value mbstring.http_output pass
  php_value mbstring.encoding_translation 0
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteBase /XXX
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

Trap number 4. You run cron manually. There is nothing wrong with running Drupal’s cron.php by hand at first. However, if you set up a search engine or do other things requiring cron, sooner or later you are going to have to face this UNIX beast. To do it, you can either SSH into your server and enter the appropriate crontab or use the Account Control Center. If the latter, go to the Advanced menu and then the Crontab Manager. Choose how often you want it to run, then enter the following (where XXX is the URL of your Drupal site):

/usr/local/bin/wget -O - -q http://XXX/cron.php

With these out of the way, you should be off and running, ready to do the real coding for a fabulous Drupal site.

Like most webmasters I know, I used to think the way to learn analytics was to just dive in and do it. That simple method works amazingly well in most other areas of webmastery. Moreover, since the statistics one generates using a tool like Google Analytics are so impressive, it’s got to just be a matter of spending a little time with them, right?

Wrong. That way madness lies — or at least eyes-crossed by a sea of numbers. The usual pattern is you get your analytics tool to work, you’re enchanted by what you see, you poke around in the numbers, you show your supervisor, she is impressed too, and then what? You return a month later, and the numbers are up. That’s great, but you have no idea why and you’re smart enough to know that if you don’t know why, it won’t be too long before they go the other direction. One month later, the numbers are plateauing, and you still don’t know why. The next month you don’t go back. You’ve got better things to do with your time.

It seems to me (in retrospect) that it’s like trying to teach yourself finance by looking at ledger sheets with no one to explain them to you. Chances are you will see some things, but not enough to make it worthwhile. It will be an exercise in frustration.

And then the day comes when your boss says: “What about those statistics? Do you have something I can share with the Board?”

You could continue to give her the big picture numbers and be done with it. But I would suggest there’s a better way that will be a great investment of your time not only for your company, but also for your career. And it doesn’t even take that long.

I took one day each week in April to learn analytics. Specifically, I took the University of British Columbia’s online Introduction to Web Analytics course. It’s the first in a series of four, leading to the UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics, a certification recognized by the Web Analytics Association.

The result? To my surprise, with just this one course, I am (for now) Vanderbilt’s foremost expert at web analytics. That won’t last long. Several others are interested, and as soon as one of them takes the second course, my moment of analytics glory will end. But more important than that, I’m already finding easy ways to apply analytics. Best of all, as promised in the course, these simple things are already making management happier. And as you might imagine happy management makes a very happy web diva.

Of course, there are other ways to learn analytics. There’s an excellent book by Avinash Kaushik: Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. And there are plenty of tutorials on line. Just search YouTube. However, I’d caution you not focus too much on any one analytics application to start with — not even Google Analytics.

The first step is to learn the fundamental principles and practices. After that, the tools will make more sense, so you can use them more effectively. If you possibly can, take the UBC course. It’s first-rate.