Linkrain Articles

I came across an awesome plugin for Wordpress that can give you detailed statistics about:

• Pageviews
• Referrers (who is sending you visitors)
• Top posts (most read articles)
• Search engine terms (what terms are people using to come to your blog?)
• Clicks (what links are clicked by your visitors?)

These are the essential statistics for a blog owner and after using them for only one day I find them very useful (the plugin is free). The author of this great plugin (skeltoac) explains why he spent a lot of time in creating it:

There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

The installation is very easy:
1) Download the plugin

2) Unzip the archive and add the file ”stats.php” to your Wordpress/Wp-content/Plugins folder

3) Login into your Wordpress account, click on “Plugins” and activate it.

Once you have followed these 3 easy steps, the plugin will ask you for a Wordpress API key. The Wordpress API key has been sent to you through email when you registered at Wordpress.COM (if you haven’t registered a free account yet, do it to get you free API key).

If you can’t find the email that Wordpress sent to you after the registration, log into your account at Wordpress.COM and click on “my profile” in the upper right corner of the screen. Now you will see a line like this:

Your WordPress.com API key is: xxxxxxxxxxxx. Don’t share your API key, it’s like a password.

This is your Wordpress API key (12 characters) and you need it to run the statistics Plugin. After you have activated the plugin and added you Wordpress API Key, you will see blog statistics after only 20 minutes.