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.

Quite a few people are coming here from Joe Newing’s site looking for information and downloads for the wpStats Wordpress plugin. Joe has handed over development to me, and hopefully I will be able to find time in between my other commitments to do some further work on wpStats.

In the meantime, you can download the plugin here. The latest version is 2.11; I hope to post the changelog and other information that appeared on binslashbash.org soon. In the next few weeks I will aim to release 2.12 which will contain updated bot signatures, and further in the future 2.2 which will introduce some new features.

If there’s anything you’d like to see in wpStats please let me know - posting comments here is a good start. Let me know what you think.

After a few days tinkering I’ve released my 2.1 version of wpStats, hot on the heels of Joe’s 2.0 version which included my hacks.

New in 2.1 is a revised approach to web crawlers, some cleaning up of the stats reporting, and a few new sections added to the stats pages. The plugin now detects hits from a load of other crawlers/bots as well.

Full changelog over at binslashbash.org, along with the download.

I went hunting for Wordpress plugins the other morning and, among other things, came across the excellent wpStats by Joe Newing. This awesome plugin collects visitor stats and displays some detailed analysis of visitor locations, browsers, OSs, pages visited, and search bots.

I thought of a few hacks that would improve the plugin, which I submitted to the author, hoping that something of mine might get included in the next release. He responded by making me “official hacker”/developer of the project, as he unfortunately has little time to work on it.

So, in the next few days I hope to be publishing my latest work on wpStats - mainly extending its features. Lucky for me the area of stats collection has great potential, so I should be able to keep thinking of improvements to make :-).

In the meantime, why not check out the most excellent current release of wpStats, right here.