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Posted by: Stuart

I enjoy working with HTML, XHTML, CSS and designers as a web developer. At home I enjoy listening to music, playing music, reading and food.

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Posted on: 25 October 2004

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Comments: 12

BBClone

I used BBClone some while back when I used to use WP but when I moved to TXP I found that it wasn’t as useful. This was because, whilst WP uses files, most of TXP is contained within the database so that page tracking becomes problematic. As I was scanning the Textpattern Forum earlier today I spotted a plug-in to enable the use of BBClone within TXP. I also found that I could get a version of BBClone that uses UTF-8. “Nice one” I thought and promptly installed everything.

I am now able to spy on you in very great detail. I can see individual articles you have read and how long you were staring at them. In fact if you’ve surfed the site a bit I can see ALL the pages you’ve been to and for how long. I get all the usual stuff such as your IP address with automatic resolving (even if you use a proxy), which country you are from, your O/S and browser type, the referer you came from if you did and if you came via a search engine I can see what your search terms were. I can get all this for robots too. I get top-ten lists for all the various bits of data and I can exclude individual IPs and referers from the data if I wish. I also get a page showing visitor totals by the hour, day, month and year.

Whether I shall prefer this to ShortStat or not remains to be seen but BBClone doesn’t use a database which could be advantageous.

Comments ( 12 )

Lizz
Sir, I know you’re obsessed, but STOP FOLLOWING ME!!!!
25 October 2004, 22:52
Stuart
Can I tell you anything?
25 October 2004, 22:58
Podz
Spooky this stuff eh ?

Given the site title, I’ll bet you get some very interesting stats !
26 October 2004, 09:18
Stuart
I do get the odd one in the search strings.
26 October 2004, 09:38
Shadow
I want to make it easy as I can for you Stuart, just to save all that effort of looking in the stats. I came here from a link to you on my site and I stopped and read the front page for a moment before I clicked on the comments and your article. For the past 19.7 seconds I have been typing this comment and once I hit preview/submit, I’m off to eat some chips. See your shiny new stats thingy wouldn’t give you that info would it now :)
26 October 2004, 14:16
Stuart
It does say that your chips aren’t brown enough for me.
26 October 2004, 14:23
Root
Your blog is looking very spiffy stu :) Do you think your Firefox ads (below) could be a bit bigger ? :)
27 October 2004, 20:55
Stuart
That’s the size it came as and I didn’t feel like changing it which is why it’s in the footer. ‘Tis only temporary though. My permanent link is in the menu from a load I picked up somewhere.
27 October 2004, 21:50
Mark
I’ve just started using the bbclone plugin too, and like it quite a bit. Have you noticed that in the “Global Stats” where it lists the top 10 page hits, the link names are correct, but the link URLs are bogus? I’ve never used bbclone before (or the plugin) so I don’t know if I’ve just hosed up the configuration, or if this is something specific to the Textpattern plugin.

Oh, thanks for the Textpattern articles mention :).

Regards,
Mark Norton
(a.k.a. Remillard in various spots on the ‘net.)
29 October 2004, 16:44
Stuart
Welcome Mark. No problem with the links. I think they are useful. Yes I am aware of the bogus link thing so it’s not your set-up. I remember that, either in the plug-in help or the forum, it does say that it will just indicate a TXP page with the TXP prefix. I’m pretty sure this is simply because TXP is almost entirely in the database. I believe that any section pages should show up properly and I get on quite well with that. It’s not like I need an actual link just the knowledge of where people are going. I do like the timings though. Lets you know what is being read and what is just being skipped over.
29 October 2004, 19:23
Mark
Ahh good. Well I had a few days of wondering “if the link part is messed up, how much of the rest of it may not be set up right?” but then took a peek at the code and decided it probably was (at least by inspection) just the way the thing was coded. It might be an interesting exercise to fix, but like you I am generally content to just see what’s getting peeked at. Works nicely in conjunction with the Textpattern admin::logs page.
29 October 2004, 22:28
Stuart
Yes though I don’t use the logs as I have Dean’s Referer set up.
29 October 2004, 22:41

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