after several minutes of getting nowhere… Vincent: Cancel the account. I don’t know how to make this any clearer for you. Cancel the account. When I say cancel the account, I don’t mean help me figure out how to keep it, I mean cancel the account.

More to the story, though. Turns out Vincent received a nice apology from AOL and the snotty customer rentention expert got fired. Ferrari’s website, Insignificant Thoughts, was hammered by Digg and the story turned out to be a good test of the revamped Netscape.com. CNBC interviewed him as well.

There are various options, including the number of days to display, the width of each bar, the height of the graph, colors, etc.

I’ve placed it on this site (for now).

More info on sparklines at Edward Tufte’s website, and the PHP Sparkline library by James Byers.

Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence is a wonderful book, as is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Performancing for Firefox (PFF) is a great browser extension that allows you to take notes and post to CMS systems via RPC. PFF has a good featureset, including bookmarks, Performancing Metrics, and a WYSIWYG editor for notes and posting to blogs. Posting supports image uploading, posting to del.icio.us, and Technorati tagging. All good stuff.

Account Wizard Problem

However, as of PFF version 1.3, there appears to be a problem with the Performancing Account Wizard. It will attempt to auto-detect and configure your blog, given the main URL. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work with WordPress and, apparently, MoveableType. It returns an error “Sorry, could not autodetect settings.” See the image to the right.

This is not a huge deal, as there are a few suggestions to get it to work. One is to copy the xmlrpc.php file (used by PFF to read and post to your blog) to another file such as myapi.php. I did this and it worked. Great. The explanation is that your host may be blocking xmlrpc.php to stop spammers from hijacking blogs. Sounds reasonable.

Setting up another site, I attempted to Manually Configure it as a custom account from the get-go, bypassing any autodetect features. Sure enough, it worked, even using xmlrpc.php.

Curious, I deleted the account with myapi.php, deleted myapi.php from the server, and re-Added the account, this time manually configuring a custom account, but using xmlrpc.php. Worked fine. PFF found the WordPress install and was happy as a clam.

So, leaving xmlrpc.php may or may not be a good idea, but there is definitely something odd about PFF’s autodetect process and manually configuring a custom account seems to be a good work-around.

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