Wibsite.com

Using the new Wibstats system

chris — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 13:35:50 +0000

As some of you have already seen (thanks for the nice messages, by the way) the Wibstats blog statistics software has been updated. There are quite a few changes, here’s a quick list:

New menu system – the separate reports now appear as menu items in the left-hand list (at the bottom, below Settings)
Fixes for the date range reports (they are faster to load, and I’ve also learned to count)
Fixes for referring site reports (it now ignores search engines)
New percentage columns (for instance the percentage of people who visited from the U.K.)
Times reports showing when people visited your blog, for example the number (and percentage) of people visiting on each day of the week

There are also some other changes which, frankly, I can’t remember right now. But there is one thing I do remember which is prety cool. I’ve used the Wordpress shortcodes system so you can put your statistics right into your blog posts and pages. How? Simples:

[wibstats report="popularsearches"]

Will give you;

Search	Visitors
wibsite	42.43%
wibsite.com	7.62%
10575961	4.71%
wiblog	2.96%
2	1.45%
178	1.31%
1	1.26%
www.wibsite.com	0.73%
boring blog	0.53%
WIB SITE	0.5%

Want another example? OK:

[wibstats report="recentcountries"]

Gives:

Country	Time
USA	4:04 pm
Unknown	3:52 pm
USA	3:38 pm
Australia	3:35 pm
Unknown	3:24 pm
USA	2:51 pm
United States	2:30 pm
Reserved	1:47 pm
USA	1:36 pm
USA	1:29 pm

Pretty cool, huh? There are quite a few different reports you can show (these go in the report="report-name-here" bit).

popularcountries: The most popular countries to visit your blog
popularcities: The most popular cities to visit your blog
recentcountries: The most recent countries to visit your blog
recentcities: The most recent cities to visit your blog
popularbrowsers: The most popular browsers to visit your blog
popularplatforms: The most popular platforms (operating systems) to visit your blog
popularscreensizes: The most popular screen sizes to visit your blog
popularsearches: The most popular search words which found your blog
recentsearches: The most recent search words which found your blog
populardays: The most popular days of the week that people visited your blog
popularhours: The most popular hours of the day that people visited your blog
popularmonths: The most popular months of the year that people visited your blog
popularreferrers: The most popular referring websites that sent visitors to your blog
recentreferrers: The most recent referring websites that sent visitors to your blog
session: A breakdown of the data associated with the current visitor to your blog (their country, city, browser etc)

A couple of other options allow you to configure these reports as they display on your posts/pages.

size: sets the number of items you want to show (minimum 1, maximum 100)

cache: sets how long you want the report to be cached for. Caching means that the report isn’t recalculated every time someone visits the page, meaning the page is a little bit faster to load.

The size option is set in minutes, with "0" meaning not-cached-at-all (the report is recalculated every time someone visits the page it appears on) and "-1" for cached forever (the report is generated once then remains the same forever).

So, a couple more examples:

[wibstats report="popularcities" size="25"]

This shows the top 25 most popular cities to visit your blog.

[wibstats report="recentsearches" size="5" cache="0"]

This shows the top 5 latest search words which brought visitors to your blog, and is not cached at all.

[wibstats report="popularreferrers" size="50" cache="-1"]

This shows the top 50 most popular referring websites (sites that have a link to your blog) and is cached forever. This means the report will show what the top referring sites are now and will never be updated.

Hopefully these options are pretty easy to understand. Give me a shout in the forums or comments here if you get stuck.

In the future I hope to do some more features for Wibstats (which is available for anyone to use) including:

Reports by email: the Wibstats system emails you daily, weekly or monthly with the latest stats from your blog
Proper graphs, pie charts and more
A "live" view showing who is visiting your blog Right Now
Details on how long people looked at pages for, and where they went when they left

That lot may take me some time to complete, however…

New WibStats

chris — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 23:33:09 +0000

New year, new statistics. There’s now a completely rewritten statistics package running on your blog. You’ll see the different reports when you go into your admin area. But the reports, great as they are, are just the surface. There’s some REALLY cool stuff you can do which I’ll tell you about soon.

For now, it’s bedtime. Coding really takes it out of one.

Security upgrade

admin — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 20:06:33 +0000

We’ve just upgraded the Wibsite to the latest (and greatest, and ratest, and … I’ll stop) version of Wordpress. A security problem in the old version has caused quite a bit of consternation of the the last few days and an upgrade was definitely needed. It looks like it’s worked OK, but if you notice anything strange please let us know.

I’ve also had a good prune of what looked like spammy user accounts. If you suddently can;t log in it’s because, basically, you look like a reconstituted meat product. But take heart! A quick email to the Wibsite administrators will set you back on the slightly wonky and narrow.

And as if that’s not enough, there’s been LOADS of work put into the statistics for each blog. The full details are on my website here, but here are some screenshots of what you have Right Now waiting for you.

New themes for 2009

chris — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:00:01 +0000

We’d all love to be better dressed in 2009, so to help you with that we’ve just added a few more stylish themes to try out on your Wiblogs. Pictures speak prouder than worms, so here’s a few screenshots to whet your appetites:

Wibsite.com on a teeny tiny screen

chris — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:29:00 +0000

If you want to keep up with the latest happenings with the Wiblogs on the move, no longer do you have to view the full homepage which has been known for being slow. Now, there’s a new Mobile version of the Wibsite to take with you wherever you go. If you are lucky enough to have Internet access on your mobile phone.

Just take a look-see here: http://mobile.wibsite.com/

I’ve also speeded up the homepage a bit.

Some changes and additions

chris — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:01:41 +0000

We’ve been hard at work knocking a few of the rough edges and sharp corners off the new Wibsite. In particular we’ve fixed the image uploading problem (have you seen the beginnings of our new help section, with images?) and given you 250mb 500mb of space to save your pictures. You should be able to save a LOT of pictures of cats, tortoises or other animals with that amount of space.

I’ve also just added a dozen or so more themes, here’s a few screenshots from them:

So now you should have no reason for those “I can’t believe she’s wearing the same dress as me!” moments.

There’s lots more in the pipeline, not least of which is completing the help section and working on the main Wibsite website to show more of what’s happening around all the Wiblogs. In the meantime happy blogging, and remember you can ask for help in the boards (or by email or comments here if that’s not working).

Launch of the all-new Wibsite.com

chris — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 22:19:22 +0000

It’s been an awful, awful long time coming, but it’s finally here. A brand-spanking new Wibsite.com running off a world-class piece of software which allows much more advanced use of the Wiblogs. We’ve got a new design, much more prominent Wiblogs on the homepage, new boards, new admin and a collection of new themes (and more to come).

There’ll no doubt be a lot more put here about the new Wibsite.com over the next few days, but for now just have fun!