Olaf’s Thoughts About Development

I recently relocated my blog and switched to WordPress as blogging engine. I must say, I’m really happy about this new blogging engine. It has thousands of plugins, virtually one plugin per possible requirement. Counterize II is a powerful hit-tracking plugin.

This morning Holger asked me how to get stats for his new blog. By coincidence his new Blog is also powered by WordPress. Ok, not really by coincidence – I introduced him to WP a few days ago

I said “good question, I assume there is a plugin”. 5 Minutes later we both had Counterize II installed and running. Extremly easy to setup.

Counterize produces a rich list of various stats, which allow you to figure out how your blog is consumed.  Counterize works completely local, it does not connect to any external service such as Google-Analytics. All data is stored in your own WordPress database. An important point is that it does not archive IP numbers, which is prohibited in some countries (such as Germany). Technically it stores hashes instead – which can not be converted back to their original IP number later again.

Below is a  screenshot of my initial stats about referers and used web browser. Interestingly Firefox outweighs Internet Explorer pretty clearly

It of course provides many more stats. For a sample of all available stats see here.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 14:22 and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.