I know the title sounds like a catchy, new book that is about to come out but the reality is a dream of mine came true today even though I’m going through one of the hardest trials in my life. Some things will always remain private, but my life has turned upside down (literally) a few days ago and I don’t think I’ve personally felt as much pain and angst as I did since my brother passed away in 2005.

On a much more positive note, Cali Lewis from Geekbrief.tv not only mentioned my name in today’s episode but she also discussed a blog post I wrote regarding getting Woopra installed on a Mac. This has been a dream of mine ever since I began watching Geekbrief.TV back in August 2007.

Thank you, my readers, for keeping me blogging and for subscribing to my blog and continuing to support me. It means the world.

You can watch the Geekbrief episode here.

The post of mine that Geekbrief is referring is here.

For weeks now, I’ve been wishing and hoping I could find a way to get the Woopra desktop client installed on my Macbook. As most of you know, you have to have version 1.6 Java Virtual Machine to run Woopra. Well, last night, I figured it out!

For those who don’t know what Woopra is, feel free to click here to learn more.

While I was researching other websites that explained how to install Woopra on a Mac, everything that I was reading was still not allowing it to work on mine. I then came across a wonderful website that provided an additional step and voila: it works!

From my understanding, this only works on Intel Macs running Tiger or Leopard!!!

Please feel free to add a comment or email me if these instructions do not make sense.

(1) Download the Woopra Desktop Client here. Once you’ve downloaded it, COPY THE INSTALL IMAGE TO YOUR DESKTOP (in other words, copy the .dmg file to your computer). After you’ve copied this to your desktop, right-click your mouse on the Woopra Install image. You will then click on “Show Package Contents”. Open the file under the contents folder titled Info.plist. In your text-editor, you will need to change the following:

Under the line <key>JVMVersion</key> change “<string>1.3+</string>” to “<string>1.6+</string>” (w/o the parenthesis)

Once you’ve changed this key, save the Info.plist and you’re done with that (for now). DO NOT ATTEMPT TO INSTALL WOOPRA JUST YET. THERE’S MORE TO DO.

(2) As of yesterday, you can download the correct Java version directly from Apple – it’s super easy. Go here to download the file. (I was just informed of this today, after I already installed Woopra. I guess Apple just released the version of Java that we’ve been needing for Woopra yesterday.)

(4) Install the new Java software. After you install, though, there’s one more step (this is where I kept getting caught up). You have to tell your Mac to begin using this version of Java rather than the other, previously installed versions of Java OR Woopra will not install correctly and you’ll get errors. To do this, on your Mac, go to Applications->Utilities->Java->Java Preferences.

(5) On the General tab, under Java Applet Runtime Settings, select “Java SE 6″. You will then re-arrange the list of Java versions so that Java SE 6 is the top item. Click Save. I PERSONALLY REBOOTED MY MACBOOK BEFORE I COMPLETED STEP #6!!!

(6) Now, you should be able to install Woopra on your Mac. It worked just fine for me! I’d love to hear your comments and let me know if this helped you!

Feel free to leave a comment below if you need help or email me here.

Thanks a million for my 2 fantastic friends, the ever-so-famous-yet-love-to-help-the-little-guys “tech celebrities” Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell.  Not only do I love these 2 for living in Dallas and having one of the largely watched podcasts in the world, but I also love them for their down-to-earth sincerinity and great twitter conversations that Neal and I (from tech news, to politics, to God, to my doggie!)

Anyways, they were kind enough to give me an invite code to Woopra.  Woopra is the stats manager of all statistics for a website.  Anyone who owns a website and wants REAL-TIME graphical information and unbeilevably cool graphics that show what your users are reading, doing, leaving on, etc… well it’s a huge help and it’s been needed for quite some time.

Click here to check out Cali Lewis’ GeekBrief.TV episode: they were the first to interview the owners of Woopra…

The video below is my 3 minutes of showing you what Woopra is doing for me and some of the cool things you can see when others are on your site.  At the time of filming, I had no one on my website actively so I went ahead and logged on from my other laptop to show you how Woopra populates when a new user comes on – all live!  Incredible!  Enjoy!