The on thing that my blog had been missing was stats. I had never really known how many people were visiting my blog and what they were reading. So I starting looking into something like Google Analytics but after looking at it for a while integrating the system into the blog looked a quite a bit of work. ( I later found a plugin that could help and that maybe an option for the future.) Just when I gave up on finding something quick and simple I found that Wordpress had just released the Automattic Stats plugin. It works similar to their Akismet spam blocker as it runs outside of my server as a service.

So I went and installed it, because it is a plugin installation is fast quick and easy. I only had to make one mod to the theme that I am using and presto I now have stats. Now this is 1.0 software and while it gives basic stat information its level on granularity is not what I was hoping for, but as they improve it I am sure it will get better. The nice thing also with using the plugin is that as long as I am logged into the blogs dashboard my own visits to the site are not tracked. This makes it nice for when I am working on visual changes to the blog, I wont have to worry about artificially rising the counts.

The funny thing is that if you look at the stats screenshot above, there is a massive spike on the first day. Well it turns out that the same day I installed the stat engine was also the day that Danny Choo linked to a post on my site. So I had to wait before I could get a base line for traffic. Now one thing I don’t know and I am trying to find out is if the plugin track know bots like Google’s spider as visits or not cause as of right now I don’t know how may of those visits are real people and how many, if any are bots. Now I know that some of them have to be bots as my spam blocked count keeps climbing and most of that kind of trash is bot generated. Now we just sit back and see where the stat go from here.

Other Posts of Interest

• Fansubs on the Mac
• Hello From the Mac
• Clare up for Pre-order.