Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

wpStats Update

I was hav­ing a little play with ref­erer data from wpStats earlier, while I should have been writ­ing my essay, and stumbled upon the com­edy gold mine that is “the things people type into Google that lead them to my site”. Among my logs I found people who came here while search­ing for inform­a­tion on SMS.ac, “fuck the world”, and images of “middle east cars” to name but three. So I spent a few minutes writ­ing up a mod­ule for wpStats that would show the most pop­u­lar web and image search terms of users com­ing to the site from Google.

It’s not bul­let­proof — I’ve used basic string func­tions rather than pat­tern match­ing with reg­exp (Note to self: learn reg­exp) — but it seems to work well enough. In the next few weeks I will try to find time to put together a release of wpStats that will include this along with vari­ous other enhance­ments as sug­ges­ted to me over the last few months, along with a bit of a tidy-up. Consider this a call for sug­ges­tions — if you want your little tweak or wid­get included, let me know. Suggestions so far include a timezone set­ting to dis­play times in your local zone and a rewrit­ing of the bot-detection routines to use a table of pat­terns rather than an awk­ward list of string test func­tions. The com­ments in the code and gen­eral doc­u­ment­a­tion also need a solid clean.

Anyway, no guar­an­tees of when, but some­time soon with any luck. Failing that I’ll have lots of time over Easter to per­sue pro­jects like this, so it should get done then if not before.