Jason Bartholme’s SEO Blog

This week I ran out of excuses to keep paying the measly three dollars a month for MyBlogLog.com’s Pro subscription. After what occurred the other day, I started looking for an alternative to MyBlogLog’s traffic statistics. If you have not read it already, you can check out my post “MyBlogLog Disappoints Me Twice In One Day“. It recounts the poor how poorly MBL is run.

As I mentioned in my other post, I said the only thing I was using MyBloglog for was for it’s near-live site traffic stats. I know there are tons of free analytically services out there, but I decided I wanted something to reside inside of the WordPress backend.

After trying out about six different plugins, I decided to keep SlimStat. The plugin is modified version of Jeff Minard and Marcus Kammerer’s ShortStat.

Only the plugin is installed into the wp-content/plugin folder and activated it is up and running. The stats can be viewed from the Dashboard tab. By default, the “Summary” page is displayed. Here is a brief explanation of the data sets:

• Summary - An aggregate of hits and visits with the ranges of today, yesterday, this week, this month and since installation.
• Recent domains - A list of domains where people come from.
• Recent search strings - These are the search terms that visitors used in search engines to arrive to the blog.
• New domains - This references domains of new sources of traffic.
• Recent resources - A running list of what elements of the blog are being requested.

The other tabs; When, What and Who show more data on the blog’s traffic. Data can be filtered by domain, search string and resource.

The plugin is actively being developed and has a list of future enhancements. I would like to see an export or a print option in a future release.

I believe this plugin will satisfy my need of checking live stats on my blog. Other dissatisfied users may find this plugin useful to stop using the MyBlogLog’s services until they straighten out. I will be canceling my MyBlogLog Pro membership today.