I wanted a way to count visitors for my blog. Easy enough, right? Just sign up for a free Google Analytics account, obtain a tracking ID from the account, and add the tracking ID to Octopress config file…right?

Wrong. Maybe I was doing something else incorrectly, but I didn’t get things working until I did what a guy named Stefan Alfbo wrote about. I found his blog post via Google, which reminds me that my own blog’s Google-powered search doesn’t seem to work :(.

Problem solved

Here’s the trick for getting Google Analytics working on an Octopress blog hosted on Github: open up the source/_includes/google_analytics.html file and add…

// add this line to the series of _gaq pushes already in the code
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName','github.io']);

Questions remain

Alfbo recommends putting this new line of code in between the 2 existing _gaq.push statements. I’m not sure if the order of the _gaq array really matters, but I didn’t want to chance it, so I followed his recommendation. However, this left me wondering, “What is the _gaq array anyway? How is it used? And why does it need special attention to get it working with Github hosting?”