Top 5 Tools To Track Visits To Your WordPress/Blogspot Blog

February 23, 2010 by dreamsburnred 4 Comments

Tracking how many visits you get is a direct reflection of how successful your blog is.

So being able to watch/keep track is key to monitoring your blog.

So here is my favorite 5 blog tracking tools.

1. Woopra

Woopra is a real-time website/blog tracking tool.

I absolutely love it because I can watch live visitors arriving to my blog, and from where.

I can also launch a chat session if I need to.

It is free for blogs that get under 30,000 page views per month.

It supports PHP Forums, Wikimedia, WordPress, Blogspot or anything that accepts script based HTML. Note: Does not work with wordpress.com blogs.

They have pricing plans for larger blogs.

Demo Video:

2. WordPress Stats

WordPress stats is a free visitor tracking tool.

Naturally its only for wordpress.com/wordpress hosted blogs.

It is a simplistic version of Google analytics.

Screenshots can be seen here.

Included for .com blogs, wordpress.org users download the plugin here.

3. Crawl Track

Crawl track is a radically different approach to the stat tracking.

Crawl track is .php based so it can also monitor search engine robot visits as explained in an earlier post of mine.

It can also protect against hacking attempts.

While it’s not the best looking it does have the most function, and doesn’t leave tracking cookies behind.

Since it needs a mysql database, and php it does not work with blogspot nor wordpress.com blogs.

It’s free.

4. Google Analytics

Google analytics is pretty much used by every blog and or website known.

In-fact 85/100 top 100 websites use it.

It shows visitors, time visited, location, can email you .pdf/excel data reports…which is very handy.

It’s also free.

5. Whos.Amung.Us

I’ve used Whos.Amung.Us ever since I started blogging fore a very good reason.

It’s free (paid features available), it’s visible to website visitors, its customizable. has a firefox/chrome plugin, and its a live counter.

While it doesn’t track the stats, nor keep cookies, or really do much it is useful.

It shows the live amount of users online your blog at one time.

The firefox/chrome plugins are useful for viewing stats without having much open.

It’s nice as it allows your blog visitors see how many people are visiting, and from where.

Unlike most of the others the classic button does work with wordpress.com blogs.

So that’s the Top 5 tools to track your website visits, most I use or have used at some time.

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How To: Migrate Your Blog Hosting

February 4, 2010 by dreamsburnred Leave a Comment

Moving a blog can be highly tedious at times (sometimes it can even lead to why?).

Free hosts usually don’t have enough space, features, or bandwidth that sometimes can crop up.

Moving to  a paid host can be troubling since you have to redirect all of your old viewers (including RSS subscribers) to your new URL.

Or if you have a URL your blog could be down for a few hours to a few days because of the transfer, leading to your viewers thinking you have jumped ship.

CNET TV has a video on How To: Migrate your website (useful for those who don’t know how).

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Top 10 Myths About Blogging

January 26, 2010 by dreamsburnred 5 Comments

Here is the top myths I see from blogging, call it fair advice.

Read more of this post

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How To: Monitor Search Engine Visits On Your Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

January 24, 2010 by dreamsburnred 6 Comments

SEO is key for all blogs to succeed.

Although part of SEO is seeing when and where bots visit your blog.

Crawl Track has the fix.

Crawl Track allows you to watch visitors, hacking attempts, and bot visits.

The software is free but does need to be manually installed in your MySQL server.

Here is how to set it up.

(You need a server with php 4.3 or higher, GD2 graphic library to see the graphs, and 1 MySQL database).

  1. Download the software.
  2. Upload it to your server.
  3. Create a new MySQL database for crawl track.
  4. Visit the location of crawl track on your server (usually /crawltrack/ or what ever folder you put it in).
  5. Select your language.
  6. Enter your database info.
  7. Create an admin account.
  8. Create a website tag.
  9. Insert your website tag into your WordPress theme (appearance –> editor). Remember it needs the tags.
  10. Then you can see all search engine bots. (all 4,000 of them).
  11. You can also see what your visitors visited, and if anyone attempted to hack your blog.
  12. If you want you can set your stats to be public but remember in your robots.txt to blacklist the crawltrack folder since there is over 10,000 links.

Note: This is for self hosted blogs/websites that have access to .php. WordPress.com/blogger/etc do not have access to .php (or mysql). While you can use it on non-php (html based) software (say media wiki,or phpbb forums) you will need access to your .htaccess files.

I use the software every day to monitor how many search engine pings I get, along with visitors, and hacking attempts.

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How To: Check your website/blog status anywhere

September 29, 2009 by dreamsburnred 1 Comment

Watch Tekzillas video on how to check to see if your blog is down. Is myblogworking.com can check to see if your WordPress blog is self-hosted or not, if you have super cache enabled.

It can check your RSS feeds, and http headers.

You can even post to twitter on your blogs status!

It also checks your feed/blogs 304 if modified response.

more about “How To: Check your website/blog statu…“, posted with vodpod

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