Giving Up on ShortStat
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
ShortStat is a simple statistics plugin for Wordpress. I’ve tried customizing it to suit my needs, by adding some SQL to extract more data out. But I just realized lately that there were some bugs with the extracted data. They sorta didn’t glue. I tried modifying and debugging it but it’s still the same. I guess I’m just not good at programming dates and such. Sigh..
Since the exams are already round the corner, I gave up on ShortStat. I just don’t have the time to make it work. After some Googling, I found Tracewatch. It’s PHP/MySQL based so you have to host it yourself. You can find a working demo here. It’s pretty neat though the graphs don’t seem to work in Firefox and Opera.
One feature that I loved about Tracewatch is it’s ability to delete/trim statistics automatically, keeping the size of your database managable. If your site traffic is pretty heavy, this might reduce the server load when viewing stat reports too. However, the delete/trim options has descriptions/explanations that are pretty vague, so I just left them at their defaults.
Installation on your server is pretty straightforward, similar to Wordpress. There’s two ways for you to log stats for a page: a PHP include or a JavaScript erm, method. I’ve using the PHP one by adding the include codes in wproot/index.php but it didn’t seem to work. Left with no other choice, I used the JavaScript method.
One note about Tracewatch: it’s free, but not open source as the codes are obfuscated. So you can’t really make small modifications to it. What a waste…
One Response to “Giving Up on ShortStat”
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Dave Says:
February 23rd, 2006 at 10:55 amIf anyone has successfully added the PHP code please post it. I’m having trouble adding it as well. Thanks.
