My Lil Counter For Wordpress Plugin
My Lil’ Counter is a simple page counter plugin for Wordpress.I wrote this plugin after trying a bunch of different plugins that either sucked, did way to much, or both. One of the more popular counters actually did a pretty good job but when put on a highly trafficked blog, it just made the database enormous! Granted, there was a way to clear out the old data, but you had to log in to the blog and do it manually. I don’t know about you, but I have better things to do.
My Lil’ Counter was designed to be SIMPLE. Most hosting packages already come with a way to view detailed server logs. If you want to see referrers by country, time of day, hour, etc. you can simply use AWStats or something similar. What I wanted was a SIMPLE way to answer this question: “How many visitors am I getting a day?”.
I also got sick of having to try and weed out crawlers and bots. Usually this involves adding user agent strings and ip addresses at an ongoing basis. Also lame and no fun. So the solution is to use Javascript. This weeds out 99.9% of crawlers and bots while making sure not to miss a single real visitor. In fact, if you run Google Adsense on your blog, this plugin reports almost exactly the number of visitors Google does. So it’s both effective and requires zero maintenance.
The ideal counter for me would also have a way to be checked remotely. I run a lot of blogs and I wanted to be able to get a report that showed how much traffic all my blogs were getting. Obviously, I don’t want to log in to 100 different Wordpress installations. There had to be a better way!
Features:
- Uses Javascript to effectively ignore all crawlers/bots so you get an accurate
count of REAL visitors to your blog pages. There is no need to constantly
block IP’s or add user agent strings to weed out new bots. - Keeps the database small by totalling page views each day. For a blog that gets
hundreds of visitors a day, this is really important! Other Wordpress counters
create huge amounts of data in the database and tax server resources. - Does not try to do everything by storing all sorts of stats you don’t care about.
Only unique visitors and page views are tracked to give you a fast, accurate
picture of how much traffic you are getting. - Power User Feature: Remote Activation. If you operate a lot of blogs, you can
upload this plugin everywhere and activate it remotely without logging in to each
Wordpress installation. - Power User Feature: Remote Stat Viewing. If you operate a lot of blogs you can
check and download stats for each blog without logging in to each Wordpress
installation. Sample code is included. You can easily write a script to check traffic onall of your blogs in a few minutes! - Power User Feature: No Fingerprints! If you operate a lot of blogs and don’t necessarily want to giver away your network, than this counter is great. There are no identifiable things like API keys or anything else to tie your blogs together. The same can’t be said for any centralized type stat service like wordpress.com stats, Google Analytics, or any other free service.
I hope you find it useful. Please leave feedback, bug reports, and suggestions in the comments section.
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