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.

4

wpStats — Download

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.

12

wpStats 2.1

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.

wpStats Development

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.