wp-shortstat plugin
Ok this is cool. A WordPress plugin that tracks stats about your blog. This is like a mini-version of any website tracking software available. The only difference is it simply tracks the hits to your blog. If you have a site that includes pages outside of your blog this can be very helpful. It makes it easier to delineate hits to your blog versus hits to the rest of your website.
A note on installation:
Installation is easy. One simple plugin file that is placed inside the plugin folder. Activate from within the Plugin panel and it is ready to go. The stats appear as a tab on the dashboard page.
Make sure these two files exist in your wp-admin folder:
upgrade-functions.php
upgrade-schema.php
If those don’t exist, errors will occur.
I really like the browser percentage category. It is really no different then other stat counters with one major exception: it identifies hits from Search Engines/Crawlers. Woohoo! At the least, it provides some basic input between human activity and bot activity. This is one of my main struggles with web site statistics in general. Though basic, this simple percentage is helpful to me. Now, to push it a bit further: The number of hits category could delineate between hits from a bot and hits from “human activity” . Yes I can use the percantage found in the browser category to do the math, but since shortstat is recording it already then it should do the break outs for me!
The Next Step:
A WordPress Plugin that tracks stats on your feed! I am not much of a programmer, but I’ve read the support pages enough to know that there are some very talented people out there. I know someone can build a plugin that can provide something similar to Feedburner. Imagine that, feed stats hosted on your own site, no messing with the .htaccess file, no worries about Feedburner going out of business, total control over your feed and its stats. If only I had the money, I would make it a contest and offer a cash prize. Hmmm. Who has some deep pockets out there?
Plus imagine what a plugin would do to the appeal of WordPress? Shoot it through the roof I imagine.
I’ve updated wp-shortstat with code from three sources, see this posting: http://blog.happyarts.de/2006/01/17/65
January 24th, 2006 at 8:37 am