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.

My old location at blogs.atozed.com was originally meant to be a central place for all Atozed bloggers. For some reason I remained the only person using that blog space.

The blog engine used there is IntraWeb Studio a Content Management System (CMS) of Atozed Software. It works quite good, esp. for Websites, but for a blog I always found it a bit, well sluggish. To get a new post published or edited you have to fire up a special client.

Update: For WordPress there is a SyntaxHighlighter Plus plugin, which is also based on the code below.  I’ve updated my posts here on the new WP based blog system to use that plugin.

I just found Alex Gorbatchev’s excellent SyntaxHighlighter on Google Code. It’s JavaScript based and makes it very easy to pretty-print your source code examples. It comes with modules for:

• C#
• C++
• CSS
• Delphi
• Java
• Javascript
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• SQL
• VisualBAsic
• XML

It’s completely modular, so if you need Delphi only, then you don’t have to load all other modules. Usage is very easy, just add the following to your HTML template that drives your blog or source code pages:

<script src="/js/shCore.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="/js/shBrushDelphi.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript"></script>

shCore.js is about 13KB, the language modules and clipboard.swf are just two KB in average. If you need Delphi and C# then just add shCSharp.js to the list above. To show a piece of source code you insert the raw source inside a <pre></pre> tag pair. The actual formatting will be done by SyntaxHighlighter.

<pre class="delphi">
var
  s: string;
begin
  s := 'Hello World';
end;
</pre>