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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110 Minute WordPress.com Downtime Knocks Out 10.2 Million Blogs

February 18, 2010 by dreamsburnred 7 Comments

Today wordpress.com was down for a very long time.

It was down for 110 minutes.

The knockout (network related) affected 10.2 million blogs (including VIP blogs), that resulted in a loss of 5.5 million page views.

Now nothing was actually down…but one of wordpress.com’s network providers did a change to their network that sent wordpress.com crashing.

As a result the fail safes also did not work.

So while it was wordpress.com’s worse downtime in 4 years, it’s not that bad.

Glad that things are back up though :) .

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WordPress Mobile Blogging App Comes To Android

February 4, 2010 by dreamsburnred Leave a Comment

First blackberry had the WordPress app, then the iPhone, and now android has an app for WordPress.

The WordPress mobile app is for mobile blogging…you can do basic stuff on a basic device.

Watch the video below for more info.

Introducing WordPress for Android

Introducing WordPress for Android

This movie requires Adobe Flash for playback.

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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: Use WordPress’s Image Editor

December 22, 2009 by dreamsburnred 9 Comments

WordPress has recently received a new feature image editing.

New users will not know how to do this so I have made a video on how to edit an image easily in WordPress.

Enjoy :)

For those who can’t view video here is a text description.

  1. Either from media, or from the uploaded image tool select the image.
  2. Click on edit image.
  3. Note: Crop is auto selected.
  4. Edit the image as necessary (rotate, crop etc).
  5. For cropping you need to drag your mouse over the area you want to edit.
  6. Then click on the crop icon.
  7. Then click on save.
  8. The edited image will be saved.

The process is the same for self hosted word press blogs, or blogs at wordpress.com

Note: After an image is inserted into a post it cannot be edited. You have to remove the image, then go the insert image, media library, select the image, and then edit it.

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WordPress 2.9 Out!

December 18, 2009 by dreamsburnred 10 Comments

My guess was right.

WordPress 2.9 is now out.

The coolest new stuff from a user point of view is:

  1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
  2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
  3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
  4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

So update your wordpress installations! You can do it by going to Tools –> Upgrade, or downloading it from wordpress.org.

Introducing WordPress 2.9 Carmen

Introducing WordPress 2.9 Carmen

This movie requires Adobe Flash for playback.

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WordPress 2.9 Ready for Release Very Soon

December 17, 2009 by dreamsburnred 5 Comments

Good news! WordPress 2.9 hit release candidate status!

WordPress 2.9 brings tons, and tons of new features, here is some;

  • MySQL 4.1.2 or greater now required (up from 4.0)
  • Trash feature. So your posts, pages, comments and attachments can be restored in-case you accidentally delete them.
  • Image editing. So you can re-size the picture within the post.
  • Easier video embedding
  • First post is now Welcome instead of Hello World!
  • Canonical redirects, and Canonical pages support
  • Speed improvements in jQuery JS
  • Canonical post thumbnails
  • Tons, and TONS more.

Who knows it could be out by the end of the week, or the end of the year! :)

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WordPress 2.8.6 Out

November 12, 2009 by dreamsburnred Leave a Comment

Time to update folks. As WordPress 2.8.6 has squashed 2 security bugs.

2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges.  If you have untrusted authors on your blog, upgrading to 2.8.6 is recommended.

The first problem is an XSS vulnerability in Press This discovered by Benjamin Flesch.  The second problem, discovered by Dawid Golunski, is an issue with sanitizing uploaded file names that can be exploited in certain Apache configurations. Thanks to Benjamin and Dawid for finding and reporting these. – WordPress Blog

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