(Note: As of April, 2006 I have started using Performancing Metrics for my blog site(s). It’s a service, but it’s free, and pretty powerful. It doesn’t have quite the flexibility that TraceWatch does, but it’s also one less system I need to maintain.)
I run quite a number of sites and, up to now, I really wasn’t too concerned with the usage statistics. Partly because I didn’t like any of the scripts for tracking such information. They were either too much bother, didn’t give enough information, or weren’t flexible enough to cope with CMS-based sites like I have. This week I found TraceWatch. A really nice script written by a guy who, I guess, is in Iran or from Iran - based on where he has his demo running, anyway.
This script is nice and fast, does path analysis, integrates by JavaScript or PHP, looks great, and provides a wonderful dashboard view of how your site(s) are doing by hour, day, and so on. I’m using it now on two sites. Well, five sites if you count that GonZoville is really an HTML site and 3 CMS instances. Regardless, TraceWatch is handling the diverse technology I have deployed just fine. I even was able to integrate it into a Flash image gallery on another site. Awesome.
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How did you acomplish adding the PHP code to your wordpress files? Any help you can provide would be much appreciated. Thanks
Just add the JavaScript code from their code generator to the footer.php file in your theme. That’s all there is to it. Or you can add the PHP code, I just found that the JS seems to work better for some reason.
D0K
I’ve tried that with no luck. I used botht the PHP and the JavaScript. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. I’ve placed it in the header, in the footer and in the main index file. Noting seemed to work. I know I have TraceWatch set up correctly b/c I made a dummy PHP page just to test and that worked fine. I just can’t get it to work on WP. If anyone has the answer please let me know. Thanks for your help.
Here is what I’ve tried. I’ve also tried the JS method on the header and footer - that didn’t work either and I’d rather not use JS - if I can help it.
Thanks again for all your help.
Are you sure you didn’t set the “Don’t Count Me” check box when you logged into TW? I did that a couple times installing TW on various sites and I kicked myself every time for wasting hours figuring out why it wasn’t working.
Also make sure that all the file paths are what they should be. If you have WP in a sub directory you may need to keep the TW files at the root of your web area.
Other than that - I don’t know - those are the only integration issues I’ve hit.
DoK,
Thanks for your help. I think I’ve found the problem. I did make sure not to check the “Don’t Count Me” checkbox, but honestly that could have very well been it - I’ve spent countless hours on stuff like that before only to realize how much of a dumbass I am. Anyway, I did make sure that I didn’t drop the cookie. Here’s my issue below - let me know if you have any suggestions.
I have my WP directory set up as a subdomain eg. df.davefink.com - I believe this is the problem. I tried playing around with the code on a dummy (non-WP) page. When I browsed to it as df.davefink.com/test.php - it didn’t track - however went to davefink.com/df/test.php - it did! Go figure.
I’m thinking it has something to do with the “Local root folder” setting. I’ve been trying to setup the “absolute file system path” setting using the gen. tool http://www.tracewatch.com/doc/code.php but I couldn’t get it to work. Not even when I browsed to davefink.com/df/test.php. I’m wondering if I used the wrong paths. I tried using an absolute path ‘http://davefink.com/stats’ as well as the server path ‘/home/[user]/public_html/stats’. I haven’t had luck either way and I couldn’t find any further documentation. Do you know what I’m doing wrong?
My last resort is to set up WP in the root public_html folder - I’ve just been trying to avoid this b/c I like to keep my directory clean and I have other sites. If you have any suggestions or ideas let me know. Thanks again for all your help. I appreciate it.
-Dave
I think there’s only 1 file and 1 directory that TW needs, so putting these in the root doesn’t clutter things up too much. I’m pretty sure the web root folder is the problem. You may be able to get away with just having the .php file that gets referenced in the web root.
Since he encodes the source there’s no way to hack around this.
By the way, you may also want to try the Counterize plug-in for WP. It’s not as detailed as TW but it integrates right into the system. That’s how I print out the hit stats at the bottom of my site.