mattbriançon

Earlier today the guys over at Wordpress.org released the API and a new plug-in for their stats system.

For those who don’t know, hosted blogs over at Wordpress.com have access to site metrics that allow them to track visitors, clicks, etc. Until now, everyone with a self-hosted blog (such as the one you’re reading now) has had to find other means of tracking visitors (like Google Analytics or Mint).

Personally, I don’t get enough hits (yet!) to justify spending money on site metrics so I’ve been using the first service at Google.

Now that Wordpress has released a plugin made specifically for all of the WP blogs out there, this is just another option.

Some interesting details about the WP Stats plugin:

• Hosted off-site by Wordpress so you don’t have to worry about your site going down if you get dugg or slashdotted (not a huge concern for me…digg me!)
• Because it’s all off-site, it’s pretty much impossible to screw up installation (all you need is an API key which you have if you use the Akismet plugin)
• It’s from the guys from WP so you’re pretty much guaranteed to get updates fairly often
• The stats are integrated into what is now called your “Global Dashboard” over at Wordpress.com which let’s you switch between your different blogs easily

I only activated the plug-in a few minutes ago so it’s going to take a few minutes for hits to start tracking. I’ll be sure to post again about how I like it. Later.

Update: WP Stats doesn’t seem to be working at all. I just checked my Analytics account and (to my delight) had a fair few hits. I went to check the stats on my Global Dashboard expecting to see a nice size spike on the end of the graph but was disappointed to find a flat line like yesterday. Maybe the guys at WP still have some setup to do behind the scenes. I’m not giving up that easily.