ShortStat | Articles | the bombsite

I’ve been using quite a few WordPress plugins of late. I’m getting to be quite the expert at installing them. Regular visitors might have noticed though that I’ve discontinued the use of a couple of them. The first is the useronline plugin. Now there is absolutely no problem with this or the other plugin I’m going to mention so if you are using them you go right ahead and carry on. As far as the useronline plugin is concerned I just had no real use for it and I figured that it just might as well go.

The other plugin to bite the dust is Dstats2. As I said earlier there is absolutely nothing wrong with it but as I was reading through Shaun Inman’s blog on a totally unrelated matter (probably my next post) I came across his ShortStat application. I should say that this is a very nice site design too.

I must point out here that there is a basic download plus an update. If you want all the latest additions you will need to download and install both. So why do I prefer ShortStat to Dstats2? There’s a couple of reasons. First of all, despite having to do an initial install plus an update I found it easier to install than Dstats2. A minor niggle I had with Dstats2 was that it was picking up my server time. It happens to be in Santa Monica, California. A slight matter of an 8 hour differential. Now I suspect this can be tweaked but despite posting a question about it to DelyMyth’s site I didn’t get a reply. No great shakes but ShortStat can be easily modified in it’s configuration file in about 10 seconds. Maybe less. The other thing I found with Dstats was that it was duplicating information I already had in my Blog Stats plugin which you can find in the menu. This seemed a bit pointless so I removed the information from the viewing file. This is all very well but that information, whilst no longer viewable, was still being collated and stored in the database. A bit of a waste of database space I believe. Once I saw ShortStat I figured my prayers had been answered. It was giving me all the information I wanted without duplication, there was information I didn’t get from Dstats2 and I could use it sitewide and see the stats of different pages.

So what do you get? Clicking on the thumbnail should give you a full-screen view to have a look at. I haven’t bothered to alter the layout yet but then normally visitors won’t see this anyway.

Top left is a short table showing both the “hits” count and “unique” count as a total since installation and for the current day.

Beneath is a table showing the “hits” count for each of the last 7 days.

Under that is a table of percentages for the various platforms (O/S) being used.

Top right you can see percentages for the various browsers. This can be collapsed so that, for instance, all the various FireFox versions will be shown as a single instance.

Next comes referrers in 2 separate tables. The first showing the most recent and the second showing repeat referrers and how many hits you’ve had from them.

Beneath these you see the search strings that have been used along with a hit count and to the left is a table showing resources. This is a list of the various pages that have been visited and how many hits they have each had.

The bottom 2 tables show, on the left, the various countries your visitors have come from and, on the right, the languages their browsers are using.

So nothing here duplicates the information I have in my Blog Stats and, IMHO, is more relevant to me than a lot of the information I was getting from Dstats2. I speak for myself of course. As I said, Dstats2 and useronline are perfectly good plugins if they give you what you want.

Additions

Since doing the original install and this post I have now modified Shortstat in a couple of ways. First of all I have modified the layout which you can see in the new graphic is a lot neater and more logical. You will also see an extra box at the top which enables two things:-

First you can remove all the stats relating to your own IP address. This doesn’t remove data from the database, it just recalculates the various stats omitting your own data. You will need to enter your IP address or addresses during the install of this add-on.

Second, if you allow visitors to view these stats, they can do the same for their own IP address as well.

I have also been able to add functions to show the totals for the previous month and to add unique visits to the weekly stats.

The original language file has some spelling errors and some omissions. These have been corrected with a new file.

If you want to install these extras for yourself I would suggest you add the IP removal add-on first followed by the additional functions for month and week stats. The new language file can be added at any point as it has no effect on the others or vice versa. In fact you should add this anyway.

The new language file is available from Nomadig.com
The extra functions are also available from Nomadig.com though this is a different page.
The IP removal add-on is available from TheWatchmakerProject.com