About Stats

January 28th, 2007 by Basil

Many blogs like to keep up with their stats. You know, statistics. Like the number of visitors, where they came from, how long they stayed, the pages they visited, and so on.

The bad news is that WordPress MU (that's the platform we use here at ItsAPundit) doesn't include useful stats.

But there's good news. No, we didn't save a bunch of money on our car insurance. Rather, we've figured out a way to offer a couple of popular third-party stat services: Site Meter and StatCounter. And both offer free services as well as paid services.
Both are popular site stats applications. Unfortunately, full functionality requires use of JavaScript. And WordPress MU doesn't allow JavaScript. You can use the non-JavaScript methods that each service offers by entering their standard HTML in a Text Widget, but you don't get full functionality of either service.
But we've worked around that. ItsAPundit.com offers one way to use StatCounter and two ways to use Site Meter.

Site Meter

David Smith of Site Meter wrote a WordPress plugin that also works with WordPress MU. It will put your Site Meter at the bottom of your blog.

We went one step further and "widgetized" that plugin. That is to say, there's a second version of the plugin we offer. It's a Widget that you can place in your sidebar.

And, they don't interfere with each other. That is, if you accidentally activate them both, you'll get a single Site Meter. The Widget in the sidebar will take priority if both are turned on, but they won't break each other. You can thank David Smith for his excellent design for that.

To use either Site Meter — standard or Widget — just activate the plugin from the Plugins tab on your ItsAPundit blog's Dashboard. To use the Site Meter Widget, you have to take the extra step of placing it in your sidebar via the Sidebar Widgets tab underneath Presentations.

StatCounter

We've also added a StatCounter Widget to ItsAPundit. And not to make David Smith of Site Meter mad, but we based the StatCounter Widget on his original Site Meter code that we "widgetized."

You can use the StatCounter Widget by activating the plugin from the Plugins tab on your ItsAPundit blog's Dashboard, then placing it in your sidebar via the Sidebar Widgets tab underneath Presentations.

Problems?

If you have trouble using either (or both) let me know. Drop me a message. The address is in the sidebar.