![[ Google Analytics ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2010/misc-chunks/google-analytics.png)
Many bloggers, designers, and developers take advantage of Google’s free Analytics service to track and monitor their site’s statistics. Along with a Google account, all that’s needed to use Google Analytics is the addition of a small slice of JavaScript into your web pages. For a long time, there was only one way of doing this, and then in 2007 Google improved their GATC code and established a new way for including it in your web pages. Many people switched over to the newer optimized method, but may not realize that there are now three different ways to track your pages with Google Analytics. The latest method uses asynchronous tracking to minimize negative impact on user experience. Let’s take a look at each of these three methods for tracking your web pages with Google Analytics..
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With the recent Feedburner service outage, many sites across the Web experienced severe drops in their Feedburner subscriber counts. Apparently, Google is requiring all Feedburner accounts to be transferred over to Google by the end of February. In the midst of this mass migration, chaotic subscriber data has been reported to include everything from dramatic count drops and fluctuating reach statistics to zero-count values and dreaded “N/A” subscriber-count errors. Obviously, displaying erroneous subscriber-count data on your site is not a good thing. Fortunately, there are several ways to ensure that this doesn’t happen.
Over at CSS Newbie, author Rob Glazebrook weighs in with an excellent point about covering your bases when displaying your Feedburner subscriber count. As explained in the article, Feedburner’s handy API makes it easy to tap your data and display your subscriber count on your blog. Despite its best intentions, however, Feedburner occasionally returns inaccurate data or even no data at all for the subscriber count. For those of us who care about the accuracy of our publicly displayed feed statistics, displaying information like this on your site is simply unacceptable:
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If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to use Feedburner to track your feed statistics, this article describes a relatively simple, “roll-your-own” alternative. Instead of redirecting your feed traffic through Feedburner, keep your original feed URLs and place the following code into a file named “feed_stats.php” (or whatever) and upload to your server:
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In this article, I present a simple method for dramatically decreasing the size of your WordPress database by partially emptying old data from the WP-ShortStat table via the following SQL command:
DELETE FROM `wp_ss_stats` ORDER BY `id` ASC LIMIT n
That is the point of this entire article, which dips into just about everything one might need to know before employing such strategy. If you are familiar with SQL and understand the purpose and functionality of this command, feel free to grab, gulp and go. Otherwise, read on for the full story..
A little context, please..
Many WordPress users enjoy the convenient statistics provided by one of the excellent ShortStat plugins. WP-ShortStat keeps track of many essential types of data: recent referrers, search queries, referring domains, keywords, locations, browsers, and many more. Over time, the copious amount of statistical data collected by WP-ShortStat increasingly inflates the size of your WordPress database.
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One of the year-end maintenance rituals that I have decided to adopt involves sharing a few annual site statistics for Perishable Press. Over the course of the previous year, Perishable Press has gone through many changes, including switching servers multiple times, eliminating nofollow attributes from comments, and even a complete site overhaul and restructuring. Despite the chaos surrounding such events, traffic levels have continued to increase, bounce rates have steadily decreased, and the number of feed subscribers continues to grow. Overall, I extremely pleased with how the site is doing, especially considering my disdain for formal advertising and social marketing nonsense. Fortunately, with virtually zero promotional effort, Perishable Press has grown from a simple hobby site into an actual destination for web design and development information. Sure, in the endless ocean of the Internet, I am but a blip on the screen, however, looking at the statistics for 2007, I am optimistic and even excited about what the future may hold for this site.
2007 Stats
In order to save everyone time, I present the following statistics with minimal commentary. As my readers are well aware, I could spend hours and hours discussing every bleepin’ detail of every bleepin’ aspect of every bleepin’ statistic. See, you know what I’m sayin’. Instead, I will let the stats speak for themselves and then, if necessary, field any questions or concerns that you may have. Alright, enough bull droppinz — let’s get on with it..
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![[ Mint Icon ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/mint.gif "Have a Mint")
Last week, I finally got around to upgrading to Mint 2.14. The new version is quite impressive, and well worth the time (and cash) spent upgrading. In the process, however, one of my favorite, most heavily used bookmarklet things ceased to work.
Before the upgrade, I had been enjoying the highly useful Refresh-All bookmarklet by Jonathan Snook. Snook’s Mint-refresh bookmarklet made it super-easy to update all Mint data panels without having to refresh the entire page. Using the bookmarklet is much faster that reloading the browser, and there is even an alternate version that will refresh panels automatically at user-specified intervals.
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Just a note to announce the release of a new version of BlogStats PCC. BlogStats PCC is a free WordPress plugin that provides an easy way to share your blog’s core statistics with your visitors. You can show off any or all of the following statistics:
- total number of posts
- total number of comments
- total number of categories
- total number of registered users
- total number of unregistered users
- total number of individual, static pages
- the date of the most recent post modification
- a link to the most recently published blog post
- a link to the name of the most recent commentator
- date/time of the most recent blog update, displayed in your default date format
BlogStats PCC enables you to display any or all of these statistics in any location (inside the loop or elsewhere). The plugin is completely free, totally customizable, and extremely easy to use. The new version (2.3.0a) works with all versions of WordPress (1.5 - 2.3), and is available for immediate download via the official BlogStats PCC information/download page.
After switching Perishable Press to its current home at A Small Orange, I began noticing an unusual problem with referrer data displayed in Mint. Specifically, the first item recorded in the XXX Strong Mint data panel — for both “Most Recent” and “Repeat” views — displayed several thousand hits for various site resources, all from the following IP address:
127.255.255.255
zxw59eit.emirates.net.ae
Apparently, this particular location represents an invalid “loopback address.” The requested resources appear valid, indicating typical traffic patterns, but the loopback address is not the actual referrer. This issue was preventing Mint from accurately recording mountains of vital referral data.
Researching this issue reveals that the underlying problem involves the switching of a Mint installation between a 32-bit server and a 64-bit server. Installing Mint on either type of server without switching to the other should not trigger this problem. It is the switch from one to another that results in the generation of the loopback address.
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For over a year now, I have been using Markus Kämmerer’s (Happy Arts Blog) WP-ShortStat plugin for WordPress. The plugin is relatively well-maintained and remains one of my favorite admin tools. Great for popping in on stats without logging into Mint. Nonetheless, due to its IP/country-detection functionality, WP-ShortStat has experienced its share of difficulties (e.g., read through the change log on the plugin’s home page). In this article, I describe how WP-Shortstat slows down the root index-page of a site, and then suggest a (temporary) fix for the issue.
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![[ Image: Harvesting the Land ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/harvesting-com-logs.gif)
Harvesting Raw Logs For those of us using cPanel as the control panel for our websites, a wealth of information is readily available via cPanel ‘Raw Access Logs’. These logs are perpetually updated with data involving user agents, IP addresses, HTTP activity, resource access, and a whole lot more. Here is a quick tutorial on accessing and interpreting your cPanel raw access logs.
Part One: Grab ‘em
To grab a copy of your raw access logs, log into cPanel and click on the "Raw Access Logs" icon. Within the Raw Access Log interface, scroll through the list of available log files and download the raw access log(s) of your choice.
Exit cPanel and navigate to your local copy of the raw access log, which should have been downloaded as a zipped/g-zipped file (i.e., .zip or .gz file extension), with a name similar to accesslog_your-domain.com_4_20_2007.gz.
Unzip the file and extract its contents, which should be a single file named your-domain.com. Rename the file by appending a .log or .txt extension to the file name. Alternatively, if the file is not named with a .com, .net, or .whatever extension, no rename is necessary, as it also may be opened via right-click » ‘Open With…’.
That’s all there is to it. If you understand how to interpret the contents of your Raw Access Log, you’re solid gold, baby. Otherwise, continue reading for a breif tutorial to get you started with the basics..
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Mint As many statistics freaks already know, Mint is an excellent way to keep a close eye on your site’s visitors, referrers, most requested resources, and much more. Even better, Mint’s functionality is easily enhanced via a growing collection of free extensions referred to as "Peppers". Peppers provide Mint functionality for a wide range of statistical operations, including everything from geographical IP information to nice, graphical summaries of collected data.
While we have not tried every Pepper available today, we have managed to incorporate an extremely powerful arsenal of statistical weaponry that keeps us well-informed about our site’s online activity. For Mint users, the following list of Pepper extensions is essential for complete statistical analysis..
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Note to self: Here is the .htaccess code for creating an Apache Rewrite log. This is definitely helpful for testing .htaccess rewrite rules, permalinks, etc. Update: as jc points out in the comments section, Apache versions 2.2 or better no longer allow RewriteLog directives in htaccess files. For these versions, it is necessary to coordinate logging through the server configuration file or via virtual host. For more information, check the source. For pre-2.2 versions of Apache, continue reading to learn how to Roll your own Apache Rewrite Log!
via http.conf
Twist one up via the Apache configuration file by placing this code at the foot of your http.conf (remember to edit the path):
# Roll your own Rewrite log
# Log details via scale of 1 to 9
# 1 = few details, 5 = enough details, 9 = too much detail
RewriteEngine On
RewriteLog "/absolute/path/to/your/wwwroot/public_html/rewrite.log"
RewriteLogLevel 5
via htaccess
Roll one tuf via your site’s root .htaccess by placing this code at the end of the file (remember to edit the path):
# Roll your own Rewrite log
# Log details via scale of 1 to 9
# 1 = few details, 5 = enough details, 9 = too much detail
RewriteEngine On
RewriteLog "/absolute/path/to/your/wwwroot/public_html/rewrite.log"
RewriteLogLevel 5
Example
Here is an example indicating the type of data logged by the RewriteLog directive:
64.246.32.000 - [07/July/2007:07:07:07 - 0700] [example.com/sid#80077333][rid#800b7a33/initial] (2) init rewrite engine with requested uri /press/wp-comments-post.php
64.246.32.000 - [07/July/2007:07:07:07 - 0700] [example.com/sid#80077333][rid#800b7a33/initial] (2) rewrite /press/wp-comments-post.php -> http://64.246.32.000/
64.246.32.000 - [07/July/2007:07:07:07 - 0700] [example.com/sid#80077333][rid#800b7a33/initial] (2) explicitly forcing redirect with http://64.246.32.000/
64.246.32.000 - [07/July/2007:07:07:07 - 0700] [example.com/sid#80077333][rid#800b7a33/initial] (1) escaping http://64.246.32.000/ for redirect
64.246.32.000 - [07/July/2007:07:07:07 - 0700] [example.com/sid#80077333][rid#800b7a33/initial] (1) redirect to http://64.246.32.000/ [REDIRECT/301]
Announcing the BlogStats PCC plugin for WordPress! BlogStats PCC is the easy way to display the total number of posts, comments, categories, as well as several other great statistics for your WordPress-powered website. With BlogStats PCC, you display only the information you want, where you want — inside or outside of the WordPress loop. Completely customizable, BlogStats PCC will display any combination of statistics you choose. This plugin is highly flexible, simple to use, and completely free.
Update: New version of BlogStats PCC now available! The new version now provides all of these great site statistics:
- Total number of posts
- Total number of comments
- Total number of categories
- Total number of members
- Total number of guests
- Total number of pages
- Date of most recent update
- Most recent commentator
- Most recent post
Display any or all of the provided site statistics — customize your own set to provide only the statistics you want!
Installation and Usage
- Unzip blogstats-pcc.zip and copy blogstats-pcc.php to your plugins directory.
- Upload and activate via WordPress plugin admin panel.
- Add any of the following calls to wherever you would like the information displayed:
Display the entire set of statistics in a nice list format:
<?php if (function_exists('fullstats')) { fullstats(); } ?>
Display the total number of posts, comments, and categories:
<?php if (function_exists('blogstats')) { blogstats(); } ?>
Display the total number of posts:
<?php if (function_exists('poststats')) { poststats(); } ?>
Display the total number of comments:
<?php if (function_exists('commstats')) { commstats(); } ?>
Display the total number of categories:
<?php if (function_exists('catstats')) { catstats(); } ?>
Display the total number of registered users:
<?php if (function_exists('regusers')) { regusers(); } ?>
Display the total number of unregistered users:
<?php if (function_exists('userstats')) { userstats(); } ?>
Display the total number of individual, static pages:
<?php if (function_exists('pagestats')) { pagestats(); } ?>
Display the date of the most recent post modification:
<?php if (function_exists('modstats')) { modstats(); } ?>
Display a link to the most recently published blog post:
<?php if (function_exists('recpost')) { recpost(); } ?>
Display the name of the most recent commentator as a link:
<?php if (function_exists('reccomm')) { reccomm(); } ?>
Display the date of the last update in your blog's default date format:
<?php if (function_exists('recstats')) { recstats(); } ?>
Download the Latest Version
Download BlogStats PCC [ version 2.3.1 | ~3KB | .zip | 902 downloads ]
Previous/Alternate versions of BlogStats PCC
Would you like to display the total number of posts, comments, and categories for your WordPress-powered website? Here is the code that can make it happen 1!
Update: The count posts part of this method should only be used for WordPress versions less than 2.5. For WordPress versions 2.5 and better, there is a built-in function for displaying the total number of posts. See The WordPress Codex for more information.
<?php
$numposts = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish'");
if (0 < $numposts) $numposts = number_format($numposts);
$numcomms = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_approved = '1'");
if (0 < $numcomms) $numcomms = number_format($numcomms);
$numcats = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->categories");
if (0 < $numcats) $numcats = number_format($numcats);
?>
<p><?php printf(__('There are currently %1$s <a href="%2$s" title="Posts">posts</a> and %3$s <a href="%4$s" title="Comments">comments</a>, contained within %5$s <a href="%6$s" title="categories">categories</a>.'), $numposts, 'edit.php', $numcomms, 'edit-comments.php', $numcats, 'categories.php'); ?></p>
Here is a modified version of the code, customized for our use here at Perishable Press:
<?php
$numposts = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = 'publish'");
if (0 < $numposts) $numposts = number_format($numposts);
$numcomms = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_approved = '1'");
if (0 < $numcomms) $numcomms = number_format($numcomms);
$numcats = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->categories");
if (0 < $numcats) $numcats = number_format($numcats);
?>
<?php echo $numposts . ' posts and ' . $numcomms . ' comments in ' . $numcats . ' categories'; ?>
Footnotes
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