UPDATE: bstat has been updated.

bStat is a hit and search term stats tracking plugin for WordPress. In addition to reporting lists of popular stories and popular search terms, it will report recent comments and a unique “pulse” graph showing the activity for a story or the entire blog over time.

The documentation for the current release (b3, as of July 9, 2005) explains the public functions and their use. I believe they reveal themselves in their names, so here’s a list of most of them:

• bstat_todaypop
• bstat_recentpop
• bstat_todayrefs
• bstat_recentrefs
• bstat_refsforpost
• bstat_discussionbypost
• bstat_discussionbycomment
• bstat_pulse

You can see them at work in the column at right. Look for the headings “Today’s Most Popular”, “Recently Commented”, and “Top Incoming Search Terms” Today. I built many of these features into my old pMachine-based site and you’ll find a wish-list of features at Richard Akerman’s SciLib Pad. Among the many features not yet implemented is RSS output of these lists.

Aside from the “pulse,” the most unique feature of bStat is the way it counts stats. Many hit tracking packages either increment a single counter for hits over the life-time of a story or create a detailed record for every hit. Most people agree that “hit counters” offer too little detail, but often, those detailed logs provide too much. Reporting from those detailed logs incurs a big CPU hit, forcing bloggers to compile stats at regular intervals and never offering “live” stats to the public. bStat solves this by creating a hit counter for each story each day. This allows us to see changing traffic patterns over time. Separately, bStat tracks incoming search terms in a similar manner. The result is a reasonably detailed and lightning fast stats tracking app.

tags: blog, bloggers, bstat, bstats, hit counters, live stats, logs, plugin, pmachine, pulse, search terms, statistics, stats, stats tracking, traffic patterns, wordpress, wordspress plugin

Work on my bstats plugin continues. I’ve added recently commented posts tracking, begun work on a usage graph, as requested by Richard Akerman, and put together an interesting way to track usage of the Google ads. I’m using the Google ads to figure out how to best use them on another project later. I think they look a little too commercial here too.

I’ve done nothing yet to created a list of related posts, and I’m still researching how I want to do referrer tracking. Referrer tracking is becoming increasingly problematic, as referrer spam becomes increasingly problematic. Still, it’s a feature I developed for my pMachine blog, and one I want here in WordPress. What I’d like to add now, however, is search term highlighting. Ryan Boren’s google hilite plugin might work, but it doesn’t do everything I want and doesn’t appear to be licensed as open source. I’ll be writing my own from scratch, but at least I’ve got good articles from A List Apart and Surtell.com to get me started. Regarding referrer spam, trafficstatistic.com suggests reverse-scraping a referring page to make sure your site is actually listed there. As appealing as it is, it’s so easy to circumvent that I don’t think it’s worth the time or bandwidth.

Update wp-shortstat does some interesting things too, including IP to geography guessing via hostip.info. What I don’t like about it is the DB structure it uses. I’m concerned about how big it will grow (I use a similar DB structure on another site I manage, and it’s a problem there — even though I’ve got oodles more disk space). I’m also concerned about the CPU requirements for doing stats on such a large DB.

Technorati Tags: bstats, bstat, graph, pmachine, referrer, search term, spam protection, stats, usage

I’ve been slowly struggling with the question of how to replace pMachine, my CMS engine here. I haven’t really liked any of the alternatives that others I know are using (link link link link), though I’ve been hard pressed to identify exactly what my complaints are. Among the points in Making A Better Open Source CMS, Jeffrey Veen names a few of the most frustrating for me: hard-coding of site layout in the CMS, mixing of content with site administration in the interface, and, sometimes, lax security.

He had spent some time at OpenSourceCMS, which allows anybody to fiddle with a variety of CMS installations without the time and trouble of figuring out how to install and configure them.

What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and user experience. It was software written by geeks, for geeks. This whole category of software desperately needs to be redesigned with writers, editors, designers, and site owners in mind.

…which is about exactly what my complaint against PHPNuke is. While he doesn’t actually identify anything that he’d recommend, I’m glad to know I’m not alone.

Update: of the four sites offered as examples above, three have switched to WordPress.

tags: cms, complex software, geeks, hard coding, http, lax security, open source, phpnuke, pmachine, switched, usability, wordpress