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.