ShortStat Maintenance

Update

ShortStat v0.36b is now available and implements the Google-recommended rel="nofollow" (added to all external links) to deter referrer spam.

I’ve thrown together a full install of ShortStat v0.34b with some minor maintenance updates. No new features were added but there were enough little “bug fixes” to warrant a bump in minor version number. _CHANGE_LOG.txt in the archive has the full list of what’s changed.

Download ShortStat v0.35b.

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Author
Shaun Inman
Posted
November 16th, 2004 at 12:58 am
Categories
ShortStat
Web
Comments
032 (Now closed)

032 Comments

001

Sweet man. Love the app. Can’t wait for an update with new features! Thanks.

Author
Paul Mayne
Posted
Nov 15th, 2004 8:09 pm
002

That was quick! Thanks, Shaun.

Author
Stu Schaff
Posted
Nov 15th, 2004 8:25 pm
003

I found a little bug: If I go onto my (shortstat-enabled) site with Safari 1.2 (Dutch), the language is “nl-nl” instead of “nl” or “nl-be”.

This makes the language stats a bit inaccurate: Dutch 24% Dutch/Belgium 20% nl-nl 15%

Author
hans
Posted
Nov 16th, 2004 2:46 am
004

Forgot to mention how much I appreciate your work. Great stuff!

Author
hans
Posted
Nov 16th, 2004 2:47 am
005

Thanks Hans. If you download the archive again the languages file has been updated. nl-nl now resolves to Dutch.

Author
Shaun Inman
Posted
Nov 16th, 2004 2:54 am
006

Just curious, is one of the new features going to be monthly stats? If not I may just work on that one myself when I get some time.

Thanks for making this available, its a great program!

Author
Jason G
Posted
Nov 16th, 2004 2:59 am
007

Wow that was quick :)

I tried it myself too, but adding “nl-nl” => “Dutch” to the array gives following results on the stats page:: Dutch 40% Dutch/Belgium 34% Dutch 7%

“Dutch’” is mentioned twice :s

Author
hans
Posted
Nov 16th, 2004 2:59 am
008

Most excellent. I’m impatiently waiting for .40 or a major feature “new-features” release. Keep up the good work, Shaun… I don’t use anything but Shortstat!

P.S. Holy crap, that was scary. I come to this page, I my name on two comments… “Wiat a minute! I’ve never seen this post before!” And then it hits me. I’ve met another Hans.

Author
Hans Hyttinen
Posted
Nov 16th, 2004 3:16 am
009

Okay, I’ve changed that to “Dutch/Netherlands” for now. This isn’t an issue in the next major version of ShortStat where language actually tracks the language and not language/country pairs. This will have to do for now. The archive has been updated again with the new languages.php file.

Hans meet Hans. :D

Author
Shaun Inman
Posted
Nov 16th, 2004 3:19 am
010

I should also note that while this problem has been accounted for in the next major version of ShortStat, that version is a complete rewrite with a completely different database structure so it’d be time consuming to roll that change back into older versions.

Jason, ShortStat will give a breakdown of hits for each hour in the current day, each day in the past week, each week in the past month (really the past 5 weeks) and each month in the past year. It sounds like a lot of data to throw around in the simple interface that I’d like ShortStat to be known for but I’ve sussed something out.

I mentioned in a previous thread that I’d rather under-promise and over-deliver but I guess there’s no harm in talking about features that are already done. ;D

Author
Shaun Inman
Posted
Nov 16th, 2004 3:32 am
011

Shaun,

Most excellent news, keep up the good work.

Author
Jason G
Posted
Nov 16th, 2004 4:32 am
012

This is the stats system I have been looking for. Definitely the most convenient way I’ve found to monitor who’s visting my site as well as my sub domains that I have set up.

Thanks for your hard work on this Shaun, definitely an excellent product!

Author
Jeff Smith
Posted
Nov 16th, 2004 6:46 am
013

I’mconfused.

Did everything in the readme. Seems to work properly, yet it’s not recording any stats at all.

http://www.chrisgwynne.com/stats/

Any suggestions?

Author
Chris Gwynne
Posted
Nov 16th, 2004 1:00 pm
014

Oh and it says it’s been recording stats since 1969…

Author
Chris Gwynne
Posted
Nov 16th, 2004 1:01 pm
015

The “Since” date is determined by the first recorded hit but your install hasn’t recorded any hits so it defaults to the beginning of the Unix epoch (Jan 01 1970 00:00:00). You must be east of GMT.

I notice that your /shortstat/ directory is called /stats/ have you updated the include script to reflect that?

Author
Shaun Inman
Posted
Nov 16th, 2004 1:22 pm
016

Yep, everything’s set properly, with the right path for the inc.stats.php file. Really weird. :-/

Author
Chris Gwynne
Posted
Nov 17th, 2004 4:15 am
017

I noticed that the installer didn’t add a necessary ‘language’ field to my database so I wrote a littel diddy to help out. If your v0.35b install is not showing any new stats since you installed it you may need to use these. Check all the ReadMe stuff first in case it’s something a little simpler. Shaun I hope you don’t mind…. :)

This is a script that will check the current install for the proper table structure and update it if necessary: shortstat_tableUpdate.php

This is a modified version of Shaun’s installer that does the same thing: shortstat_install_modified.php

They seem to play nice with everything on my server so they should do the same for you. Copy the source and do with them what you will.

  • J.
Author
J Cornelius
Posted
Nov 17th, 2004 2:13 pm
018

I should note that I was upgrading from a previous version. Shaun’s code seems solid for a clean install. My previous post is meant for people that were upgrading also…

Author
J Cornelius
Posted
Nov 17th, 2004 2:53 pm
019

Shoot, I knew calling it v0.35b was going to cause some confusion. This version is essentially identical to v0.34b except that it’s offered as a standalone installer.

Since J’s kindly gone through the trouble you can use his script to take advantage of the languages.php spelling corrections, commented out die() statements and quoted associative array indexes.

Author
Shaun Inman
Posted
Nov 17th, 2004 2:54 pm
020

Shaun, I am trying to use shortstat across different domains. I am running into problems. Such as it will not report back to the database… Is there a fix for this?

Author
Chris Etling
Posted
Nov 20th, 2004 3:38 pm
021

Chris, ShortStat has not been tested or developed with multiple domain support in mind. I’ll try to look into this when I have a moment though.

Author
Shaun Inman
Posted
Nov 21st, 2004 5:39 am
022

This might not be the best place for feature requests, but I figured it was worth a shot.

Could something be put into ShortStat so that when we click a referrer, they won’t see the URL to our ShortStat install in their referrer logs? I don’t really want people looking at my stats. Call me paranoid, but I can’t see any harm in doing this, and there’s at least a little benefit.

Author
Stu Schaff
Posted
Nov 21st, 2004 9:42 am
023

Well that explains it then.. I thought I did something wrong. :) Thank you for all of your help. I will check back often to see if you have come up with anything.

Author
Chris Etling
Posted
Nov 21st, 2004 12:39 pm
024

Now, that teaser on Cameron’s site is just not right! C’mon, post it already … public beta … something. It looks great, and by gosh i need it! (and if you need someone to beta on a server with PHP5/MySQL 4, ummm … here’s my hand being raised ;)

Author
Ryan Thrash
Posted
Nov 23rd, 2004 6:53 am
025

Stu, there are currently no plans to provide this feature. Depending on post-v1.0 demand I could write something up but I don’t have the time to expend on that right now. You could always look into using .htaccess to protect your ShortStat directory.

Sorry Ryan, I still need to work out the new licensing agreement, registration process, contingency design, branding and shortstat.com.

But progress is being made. The private beta should be going out to testers tonight. (Thanks for offering to test but I already have the necessary cross-section of server configurations.)

Author
Shaun Inman
Posted
Nov 23rd, 2004 7:21 am
026

Will there be support to catch non-direct links? For example, if I link directly to a folder ‘foo’ inside that there is index.php which has the stat code at the top

there are stats recorded for foo/ (which is technically foo/index.php)

but if I link directly to foo/index.php it will track the hits seperately

will the new version support the total hits for direct links to foo/ and foo/index.php ?

Author
Dave Martin
Posted
Dec 24th, 2004 9:00 am
027

I ping my site a lot but don’t want my visits to be weighed into the statistics. What is the best way to keep shortstats from recording any of my activity?

Author
Zach Harkey
Posted
Dec 30th, 2004 10:47 am
028

Most FireFox users have an extra record in the database due to a call made by FireFox to the FAVICON.ICO file on the server (which doesn’t exist).

Is it possible to remove these entries? And potentially block them from being entered into the tables?

Thanks,

DR

Author
David Ryan
Posted
Jan 4th, 2005 7:59 am
029

great programme - thanks! but, of course, i have some questions. :o)

regarding html files, how do i get shortstat to recognise them? i have placed the php include on the page, (at the very top, before the html tag), and that isn’t working.

referrer spam. i get a lot of it. is there any way of blocking certain domain names?

also, whilst it catches my subdomains, the info is screwy and doesn’t point to the correct subdomain. it just points to my root directory. is this an issue with the way my subdomains are set up on the server?

thanks again. this works perfectly on my other website. :o)

Author
tank green
Posted
Jan 19th, 2005 5:56 am
030

Following the announcement of the new ‘rel=”nofollow”’ tag standard by Google, MSN, and Yahoo!, I made a slight change to my copy of 0.34b in the SI_getReferers() method of functions.php.

I simply inserted the rel=”nofollow” between the title tag and the end of the anchor tag. Proper use of slashes to escape the quotes, of course.

Cudos to Shaun for code that is easy to read and understand; I was able to make this change in less than 5 minutes.

~ mn

Author
Mark Nichols
Posted
Jan 20th, 2005 2:55 am
031

Hi, Thank you for ShortStat! I thought i should mention, though, that search strings containing international characters are not displaying correctly in the tables. Some character enconding problem, it seems…

Author
eduardo
Posted
Mar 24th, 2005 5:41 pm
032

Hi Shaun,

First of all, I really like shortstat. It’s simple, does the job and as an added bonus it looks sweet too. I liked it so much that I improved it. I made a version that’s invoked by javascript and involves serving a 1-pixel gif file. This has two advantages:

  1. It can be used on non-php pages or pages where you can’t include extra PHP for whatever reason. (Pivot has this problem on some pages)
  2. It’s virtually spam proof because spam-bots that try to soil your referrer stats and overview page usually can’t execute javascript. I have my modified version installed on my blog and all seems to work mighty fine. If you want to check it out visit the following article :

    i-marco.nl/weblog/archive/2005/04/05/im … _shortstat If you just want to download it immediately, do it here:

    i-marco.nl/shortstat-js.zip

Hope you like it!

Author
Marco
Posted
Apr 5th, 2005 2:07 pm