Wordpress Stats Version 1.1.1 was released soon after. It plugs a critical SQL injection security vulnerability.

I upgraded this blog and everything seems fine - the old stats remained and they’ve been updated. The instructions say the updated plugin can be copied over the old one, no mention of deactivating the plugin first. I followed my typical procedure and shut down the plugin first, then replaced it. When I restarted the plugin I had to re-enter the Wordpress API key.

Wordpress.com Stats

Wordpress.com Stats requires you to have an account at Wordpress.com, although you do not need an actual blog there. The Stats are hosted on their servers. Also, you’ll need an API key from Automattic. If you have one for Akismet you can use the same key, and if it sees the key in the DB it will offer to use it.

Assuming you don’t already have an API key you can go here for instructions on how to get one. This process will also give you an account on Wordpress.com.

One you have the API key you simply upload stats.php to your plugins directory and activate it in the plugins admin panel in your Wordpress blog. You’ll be prompted to enter the API key, or use one it finds. They say it takes about 20 minutes for stats to start showing up which I found to be fairly accurate. My busier blog showed activity in about 15 minutes while my less active blog showed activity in about 30 minutes.

Stats are viewed by selecting “Blog Stats” on the Dashboard menu in your Wordpress blog admin panel. This redirects you to your Wordpress.com admin panel and you’ll be prompted for an ID and password unless you told it to remember you.

There’s a graph showing views over the last 30 days (but only from when you started collecting stats). The top 10 posts for the current and previous days are shows along with the number of views. All times are GMT so “today” and “yesterday” are calculated based GMT. You can also drill into the top posts and get daily reports for the past seven days. These list more than the top 10 posts but still eventually truncate the least viewed posts if you have a long list. You can also get summary reports for pages viewed in the last seven or last thirty days. On any of these post views there’s a graph icon next to each post listing, clicking it displays a 30 day graph of views for the post.

The main page also displays a list of referrers for the current and previous days. This also has the ability to drill into the detail but it ends up being one of the bugs in the plugin. Drilling in shows a heading “Referrers for 7 Days…” but only the current day’s referrers are shown. Even the previous day’s referrers that were shown on the previous page have been dropped from this report.

Search engine terms used to find the blog are also shown. Again, on the main page they’re shown for the current day and yesterday. But again, drilling into them results in a header that says “Search Terms for 7 Days…” but the result is only the current day’s terms. In my case I had sixteen referrals for one search term yesterday but it didn’t make the seven day drill down even though the top search term for those seven days had only two uses and only contained what appeared to be the current days referrers. It clearly should have been there.

Finally rounding out the major stats, the clicks on the blog are also tracked. This seems to only track outbound clicks. And again, the drill down has the same issues as search and referrers.

The plugin also keeps track of total views and the “best day ever”. It also lists a couple of recent incoming links while clicking “more” brings you out to a Google Blog “links” search.

If you have multiple blogs which use the same API key you can jump between them by picking the blog from a drop down and clicking “go”.

I also found some problems that appear shortly after midnight GMT. The “Today” and “Yesterday” stats for search, referrers and clicks are identical for a period of time although eventually they become distinct. It appears the daily rollover isn’t clean until some time passes or enough news stats are collected. Although the amount of time I’ve waited seems rather random. But since I need to be at my computer at a specific time it’s been hard to track, especially since it’s not a minor issue.

Summary: The graph of views and the simple metrics for post views makes Wordpress.com Stats worth using for me. It provides a quick view of what’s recently active along with quick insight into the 30-day trend overall or for a specific page. The bugs in the referrers, search and clicks does leave gaps in it’s ability.

Google Analytics by Denis de Bernardy

In a bit of irony, prior to the redesign I used a theme by Denis de Bernardy but not his Google Analytics plugin. My main reason for switching to this plugin was it’s ability to ignore my own site visits. The plugin actually excludes visits from all authors, editors and site admins if you have a blog that uses these various roles.

You’ll need to set up a Google Analytics account before you can use the plugin. Once you do that you simply copy the contents of the plugin download to your wordpress plugins directory and activate it. Since there are two files I copied the directory contained within the zip to my plugins directory. Then, in the admin panel, locate “Google Analytics” on the “Options” menu. Paste the tracking code provided by Google Analytics into the box provided. You can also simply type your tracking number in the space provided since the code template is already there. In my case I simply replaced all the code with cut/paste from Google Analytics.

I’ve tested the ability to exclude my visits by viewing some obscure pages and Google Analytics did not report the views. Also, prior to activating the plugin my admin panel usage was tracked. This dropped to zero when I activated the plugin.

Most of my usage was with version 2.2 of the plugin. Version 2.4 is now available. The latest version uses roles rather than levels so isn’t compatible with Wordpress pre-version 2.

Summary: The plugin has no purpose unless you use Google Analytics but if you do the plugin does a good job of limiting the stats to visitors. For those of you who are anti-Google Analytics (because it gives Google too much info) Denis also has a similar plugin for HitsLink which is a paid tracking service.

Additonal Information

You can find additional information about Plugins and Wordpress on my Wordpress page.

The plugin puts some intelligence into determining the popularity of a post by allowing weights to be assigned based on how the post is viewed or used. The screenshot below shows the possibilities along with their default values.

As you can see, views from the feed carry the least weight since there’s no way to know if someone actually read the article. The same with Homepage and Archive views, they carry a bit mnore weight but not too much since there are multiple posts of the page. Trackbacks really bump things up because someone else referenced the post. Permalink Views are when someone views the article on it’s own page. Either because they came via a search engine or clicked the article URL on the Archive or Home page. These values are fully configurable so that they can be customized to the structure of the site.

You can see the current rankings for my site in the bottom of the right sitebar. The most popular posts of all time along with the most popular for the month so far are shown. Unless there’s a lot of trackbacks or comments there’s a bias to new posts in the beginning since they collect points with homepage views. The plugin also includes the ability to recalculate trackback/pingback/comment values which is useful if you have to delete spam. This calculation can also be scheduled using cron so the values can be automatically re-calculated every night.

The plugin also includes several template tags. The widget in the sidebar uses the tag for the most popular of all time along with the tag for most popular in a month. A tag for most popular in a category is also available. The plugin creates a “Most Popular” page in the Wordpress Dashboard which shows the most popular posts in categories and views and serves as an example of what can be done.

The plugin also displays the popularity of each post, in relation to the most popular, within each post (at the bottom). I have that feature turned off for now. I want to see what it does to feeds (if the popularity changesm does the feed change?) and collect more data before displaying it.

You can follow future updates and information about the Popularity Contest plugin on my Wordpress page.

While I hadn’t intended to use it to handle redirection for the /blog directory change, I decided to give it a try once I saw the errors from the Google web crawler since it was easier than figuring out the .htaccess commands. Plus, at the time I had access to my blog but not ftp access to the server. The plugin supports regex redirects and the website gave an example of exactly what I needed. Google hasn’t crawled my site again so it remains to be seen if it’s a true fix to the problem. (In the past, typing old /blog URLs manually were properly redirected so the fact they still work doesn’t actually prove the problem is fixed, but all signs are positive.)

But I did find another problem caused by the way I imported the postings/comments/categories from the old site rather than doing a database backup/restore. On the old site I had changed some category, posting and page names without changing their slugs. When I imported them into the new site it looks like new slugs for the permalinks were generated based on the current info (the slugs used for permalinks are based on title and are generated when the first save is done, even if it’s a draft). They began showing up in the 404 error log files for the Redirection plugin. It was simple enough to create the redirects based on these logs. In the case of category changes I could create regex redirects. The plugin logs the bad URL as a link so it was easy enough to verify it was bad and then verify the redirect worked.

The plugin has some other nice little features:

• For each configured redirection it keeps track of the number of redirections performed and the last date one was done.
• I’ve only used simple redirection but it will also redirect in other ways - to random URL, based on referrer, based on login status and to one of several URLs
• I’ve only used 301 and 302 redirects but it also does 307, 404 and pass-through redirects

An updated was released yesterday (which I haven’t had a chance to download) which has some nice usability enhancements (a search and a minor tweak to jump down to the new redirect fields when clicking the button to create a new redirect from a logged error. I haven’t had enough redirects to notice the need for these yet but they’ll certainly be appreciated if the list grows.

I had actually avoided this plugin (actually any redirect plugin at first) because I figured it would be better to manage through .htaccess. But further research shows that Wordpress creates a default redirect that puts all URLs through Wordpress so there doesn’t seem to be any benefit to using .htaccess for the redirects. It just seems easier to use the plugin, with no down-side, so I’ll probably be using it even more, especially if I do any major redesigns.

Imports from the new Blogger are now supported directly in Wordpress.

After picking Wordpress to be the primary content management system for my site (yea, it’s not a real CMS but it was simple and has what I want for now) I wanted to move some entries I had in blogger. There were only a few and when the import failed (no surprise as I’m using the blogger beta) I decide to go the same route used to get them into blogger, cut and paste.

The built in editor was bizzare. I pasted in the text and went to save. I was warned that I would lose my changes because I was navigating away from the page. Sure enough, when it refreshed the title was there (that I type) but everything I pasted was gone. I tried various workarounds such as pasting html code into the HTML window and had the same result. This happened in both Firefox 2 (Mac and Windows) and Safari on the Mac.

So it was off to quickly find a plug-in that would allow me to cut/paste. I came across EditorMonkey and that worked but support for that has been dropped. While it would have been a temporary fix I decided to keep looking.

The next one I found was WYSI-Wordpress. I was able to do the cut/paste and touch up the articles.

So I used it because I found it quickly and it works. I also liked the way it handles pictures. To add a picture to the post simply upload it (through Wordpress “Write” page) and then it can be previewed and picked from a list and either the thumbnail or full picture can be used. The potential downside I see here is that the preview list could grow large over time.

Here’s some pluses and minuses. Keep in mind I’m just getting into this so there may be solutions to the minuses.

Limited formating capability without going into the HTML code. No pre-defined header styles.

The Firefox built-in spell checker works.

Built in dictionary is funky (at least in Firefox 2). There’s a button that allows word lookups it freedictionary.com. This worked at first but now when a word is search for it opens in a new tab within the pop-up. The new tab is not sized for the pop-up (which is size-locked). It’’s extremely difficult to scroll around the window.

Excellent picture management. Allows uploading and inserting into the document. It creates thumbnails and allows them to be used.

A couple days ago I started looking at Dean’s FCKEditor For Wordpress and at this time it’s what I’m using The WYSI-Wordpress plug-in is still installed, just not activated. Using it is just a couple clicks away and I may yet switch to it.

When setting up this site I quickly found that the built-in rich-text editor had some serious shortcomings that affected me. I found the WYSI-Wordpress plug-in and used that.. I then came across this plug-in which looked interesting.

What initially attracted me to it was that I had seen the FCKeditor mentioned as used in other plug-ins and areas. This plug-in also uses the FCKeditor version current at this time so there be no additional work to get up to date.

So, after using it for a day or two:
It loads slower than the other editors, but not unreasonably slow.
It includes a full screen mode so that the editor is the only thing visible in the browser, allowing a large edit area.
When switching to HTML source editing it stays in the same window. Other editors pop up a new windows. It’s a personal preference but I like to stay working in the same window.
The file upload capability doesn’t seem to be working for me. In looking through Dean’s blog I see a couple possible solutions but haven’t had a chance to look into it yet.
Firefox 2 has a built-in spell check. While the spell check does highlight mis-spellings it’s not possible to right-click the word and select the correct word or add the word to the dictionary. Right-clicking brings up a menu with just cut,copy and paste. This context-menu seems to be a feature of FCKeditor. But, the Firefox spell checker does work when I turn off WYSIWYG mode and edit in source (html) mode. The FCKeditor page does have a couple options for a spell checker, although one is IE specific (ugh). If switching to source mode becomes too tedious I can check out these options

Not true WYSIWYG The edit window doesn’t appear the same as the preview and published pages. This may be due to the styles and the styles in FCKeditor can probable be changed to match. I say this because the differences are consistent.

So, after couple days of trying a couple editor plug-ins (and the internal editor) I’ve settled on Dean’s FCKEditor for now. Because…

• From various posts and blogs there doesn’t seem to be any perfect WYSIWYG editor plug-in for Wordpress
• The Wordpress default editor (WYSIWYG or otherwise) is out because I can’t paste info into it.
• Switching between WYSIWYG editors, on the same posts/pages, seems to magnify the problem.
• Full screen editing is great as is switching to source mode in the same editor.
• While this has four thumbs down and only two thumbs up the downers are minor and have work-arounds.