Published
Jan 18, 2010
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In Random/Personal
Well, without much delay (just 18 days compared with last year’s 56 days 
), here is my year end stats and review post for the year 2009.
Highlights of 2009
2009 has been a year of rollercoaster for me and a year full of changes both at the personal side as well as professional side.
I started the year with a trip to the operation theatre 
and then to Bangalore for attending Yahoo hack day, started having a crush on Google Wave, then changed job and moved to Bangalore and then changed my host , participated in WordPress Plugin competition and then released a couple of Plugins (for which I got an excellent review from Ozh), and then had a break-up with TV (which turned out to be a very good thing) and then visited US on a business trip and then finally ended the year, by releasing RoloPress.
Okay enough of self-bragging and time for some stats.
Number of Posts
Thanks to my break-up with TV, I got more time to spend with my blog, which can be seen from the increase in the total number of posts. The number of posts slowed down a bit towards the end of the year due to my travel and RoloPress, but on the whole, I am happy with the results
Number of comments
More than the number of posts, the one which gave me more satisfaction, is the number of comments. Last year, I said that I will try to engage more user activity in my blog and one look at the graph should say that I succeeded.
Thanks to all those who commented, you really bought a smile on my face.
Average number of characters in posts
There is a slight increase when compared with the previous years and since things have worked out well so far, I am planning to continue the same this year too.
Total number of characters in all posts
I have almost written (okay typed ) almost double the amount of characters in 2009 when compared with 2008. This is really good and I hope to continue the same next year too.
What’s in for this year?
So for this year, I am planning to concentrate more on my WordPress Plugins and RoloPress and also planning to learn a couple of languages like Haskel, Scala and R. Let’s see how things turn out
<shameless self promotion>I have created these wonderful graphs using my year end stats WordPress Plugin. If you run a WordPress blog then you can also generate these graphs by downloading my year end stats WordPress Plugin.</shameless self promotion>
Posted in Random/Personal
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Tagged 2009, RoloPress, stats, Year End Stats
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Published
Jun 11, 2009
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In API's/Webservices
I have updated my FeedBurner stats Google Gadget, to change the API endpoint to feedburner.google.com. If you have already added the gadget to iGoogle or have embedded it in your web pages, the changes will apply automatically and you don’t need to change anything.
The Gadget ceased to work after Google changed the API endpoint and it should continue to work after this change.
The full source code of this gadget is available here and if you are interested you can add it to your Google personalised page by clicking this button. 
Let me know if you still face any issues with the Gadget.
Posted in API's/Webservices
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Tagged FeedBurner, Google Gadgets, stats
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Published
Feb 26, 2009
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In Random/Personal
Well guys, I just realized that I didn’t publish my year end stats for 2008, like how I did for 2007. So without much dealy (just after two months ), here is my year end stats for 2008.
Number of posts
When number of posts is concerned, you could see that when compared with 2007, I have improved. Thanks to the pledge that I took in 2008, the number of posts has increased. This is one area where I should improve a lot more. So guys expect more mosts in 2009
Number of comments
When compared with 2007, the number of comments has increased slightly. It was 220 in 2007 and in 2008 it is 267. But it does not include the comments I get in Twitter or FriendFeed. (I should find some way to include them too). I should also start engaging the readers more. So my dear readers, start talking more and you could make me happy
Average number of characters in posts
For the past three years I am pretty much consistent in the length of my blog posts, which is around 2000 characters per post. This suits the style of my posts and I guess I will stick with this for 2009 too.
Total number of characters in posts
This represents the total number of characters that I have typed in this blog(except those removed by backspace ). Compared with 2007, I have typed more. If I succeed in my aim to write more posts in 2009, with still keeping the average length consistent, then in 2009 I will type more. Let’s see what I achieve at the end of 2009.
And this sums up my year end stats for 2008. In a nutshell, I want to
- Write more posts
- Engage users more
- Keep the average lenght of posts consistent.
Let’s see how I keep it up in 2009.
<shameless self promotion>I have created these wonderful graphs using my year end stats WordPress Plugin. If you run a WordPress blog then you can also generate these graphs by downloading my year end stats WordPress Plugin.</shameless self promotion>
Posted in Random/Personal
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Tagged 2008, Plugin, stats, WordPress, Year End Stats
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Published
Dec 28, 2008
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In WordPress
Open Flash Chart is an excellent Flash-based, open source charting component which can be used to create high-quality charts with ease. The advantage of using flash is that you can create professional quality charts with minimum effort, but the only disadvantage is that the user viewing the charts needs to have Adobe Flash Plugin installed in his browser.
It is released under open source and you are free to modify it if you know Flash and Action Script. If you are planning to start, then it has excellent tutorials and a huge array of libraries. Both Akismet stats and WordPress stats Plugin use this for displaying data in charts.
I was playing with Open Flash Chart, sometime ago and decided to use it for my Year End Stats WordPress Plugin. Instead of just including the required files with the Plugin, I separated them out into a separate WordPress Plugin so that it can be shared by other Plugins as well.
You can download the Plugin file from my Plugin page and then upload it to your wp-contents directory.
If you are a WordPress Plugin developer, then you can check my Year End Stats Plugin to find out how to integrate Open Flash Chart in your WordPress Plugin.
Posted in WordPress
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Tagged Open Flash Chart, Plugin, stats, WordPress
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Published
Mar 9, 2008
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In Linux/Unix
I must confess that I am a stats freak. If you are a long time reader of my blog, then you would have known that by now yourself. This explains the reason why I want to preserve my Apache log files in spite of using a variety of stat services like Google Analytics, WordPress stats, statscounter, performancing metrics (before it was closed).
The default Apache configuration preserves the log files only for the last 10 days, but I wanted to permanently archive this files. After some searches in Google I came across an excellent program called Cronolog. Cronolog is a simple filter program which writes each log entry to a separate log file named after the filename format specified. You can use a variety of parameters like current date, time etc to define the filename template.
First we have to install cronolog, either by using aptitude or by downloading it from its download page. Then you have to change the log file name path in the virtual host file. (In Ubuntu Gusty, the virtual host files are situated in the path /etc/apache2/sites-enabled). I am using the following file format for this blog
# Custom log file locations
LogLevel warn
ErrorLog "|/usr/sbin/cronolog /path/to/logs/%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-sudarmuthu.com-error.log"
CustomLog "|/usr/sbin/cronolog /path/to/logs/%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-sudarmuthu.com-access.log" combined
which will store my log files in separate folders for each year and for each month, like the below hierarchy
/2007/12/2007-11-01-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
/2007/12/2007-11-02-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
......
/2008/01/2008-01-01-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
/2008/01/2008-01-02-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
......
You can use a variety of modifiers for the filename and I have documented some of them in the below table. You can get more information from its documentation.
| Specifier |
Description |
| Time fields |
| %H |
hour (00..23) |
| %I |
hour (01..12) |
| %p |
the locale’s AM or PM indicator |
| %M |
minute (00..59) |
| %S |
second (00..61, which allows for leap seconds) |
| %X |
the locale’s time representation (e.g.: “15:12:47″) |
| %Z |
time zone (e.g. GMT), or nothing if the time zone cannot be determined |
| Date fields |
| %a |
the locale’s abbreviated weekday name (e.g.: Sun..Sat) |
| %A |
the locale’s full weekday name (e.g.: Sunday .. Saturday) |
| %b |
the locale’s abbreviated month name (e.g.: Jan .. Dec) |
| %B |
the locale’s full month name, (e.g.: January .. December) |
| %c |
the locale’s date and time (e.g.: "Sun Dec 15 14:12:47 GMT 1996") |
| %d |
day of month (01 .. 31) |
| %j |
day of year (001 .. 366) |
| %m |
month (01 .. 12) |
| %U |
week of the year with Sunday as first day of week (00..53, where week 1 is the week containing the first Sunday of the year) |
| %W |
week of the year with Monday as first day of week (00..53, where week 1 is the week containing the first Monday of the year) |
| %w |
day of week (0 .. 6, where 0 corresponds to Sunday) |
| %x |
locale’s date representation (e.g. today in Britain: “15/12/96″) |
| %y |
year without the century (00 .. 99) |
| %Y |
year with the century (1970 .. 2038) |
Posted in Linux/Unix
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Tagged Apache, Cronolog, Linux/Unix, Logs, stats
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Published
Feb 17, 2008
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In API's/Webservices
I had some free time this weekend and I used it to create my second Google Gadget called called FeedBurner stats. (By the way my first gadget was Bloglines Notifier, which notifies the count of unread items in your Bloglines account). It uses FeedBurner Awareness API to fetch the subscriber count of your FeedBurner feed and displays it using Google Charts API.
The full source code of this gadget is available here and if you are interested you can add it to your Google personalised page by clicking this button.
After you add the gadget, you just need to enter your FeedBurner feed URL. The gadget will fetch the subscriber count for the past one week and will display it in a nice bar graph using Google Charts API.
API’s used
The following are the API’s used for creating this gadget
Posted in API's/Webservices
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Tagged FeedBurner, Google Charts, Google Gadgets, stats
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Published
Jan 2, 2008
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In API's/Webservices, WordPress
When I published my year end stats, little did I know that numbers alone doesn’t matter much, unless they are presented in an easily-to understand manner.
So here I am representing the same numbers but in a much more understandable manner, with some support from the excellent Google Chart API, which I learned during pipesCamp.
Number of posts
You could see that the number of posts has almost dropped by 40% in 2007. There were 64 posts in 2006 where as only 38 in 2007. One reason for this is that lot of unexpected things happened in my personal life which took me away from the computer and the other reason is that I got busy and free time became a rare commodity for me. So this is an area where I should improve.
Number of comments
Again, as with the number of posts, the number of comments was also less by around 40%. There were 394 comments in 2006 but only 220 in 2007. This also includes my own comments; maybe I should represent my comments separately.
Average number of characters in posts
This graph clearly shows that average number of characters in my posts. Even though I have written fewer posts in 2007, the average number of characters has increased, which is good (which also means that I have become very talkative ). This is very good and is also motivating. In 2008 I should keep up the length of the posts and at the same time should also try to increase their number.
Total number of characters in posts
This graph clearly shows that even though I have written fewer posts, I have almost written the same amount of characters in 2007 when compared with 2006, which is again motivating.
I have really become addicted to stats now and will try to dig more deep into my blog to unearth other valuable information when I get some time. This explains why everybody was soo fascinated by Yuvi’s cool graphs.
Meanwhile you can also publish your yearend stats by using my Year End Stats WordPress Plugin. So what does your yearend stats speak about your blogging habit? Please leave a link to your yearend stats in the comments so that I can have a look at it.
PS: I would really love to see how Yuvi has scaled up this year. May be Yuvi, do it when you find time in between your exams.
Posted in API's/Webservices, WordPress
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Tagged Google Charts, stats, WordPress
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Published
Jan 1, 2008
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In WordPress
Publishing year end stats seems to be the new fashion and so here are the year end stats for my blog.
- Total number of posts in 2007: 38 Posts
- Total number of comments in 2007: 220 comments
- Average length of posts in 2007: 3048.03 Letters
- Total length of all posts in 2007: 115825 Letters
By the way this is very low when compared to my previous year (2006) stats
- Total number of posts in 2006: 64 Posts
- Total number of comments in 2006: 394 Comments
- Average length of posts in 2006: 1813.16 Letters
- Total length of all posts in 2006: 116042 Letters
I guess it is right time that I start writing more on my blog. So here goes my first resolution for the year 2008, write more in my blog.
I have also created a WordPress Plugin called WP Year End stats which you can use to get stats for your blog.
Wish you all a happy new year
Posted in WordPress
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Tagged 2007, stats, WordPress
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Published
Jan 15, 2007
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In Google/Yahoo, Random/Personal
One of the things which shocked me when I came out of my hiding period is the sudden disappearance of Performancing Metrics. As you have guessed by now, I was using it here to have an understanding of how my users use my site.
Performancing was recently acquired by PayPerPost and they couldn’t get the deal right with Metrics. This has made them to stop the hosting of Metrics service and have decided to release the code as open source, which may take some time. So the net result is that now I am left without a Stats package
Don’t get me wrong here. I am not here to criticize or accuse Performancing or PayPerPost. Metrics was a great product and I was one among the thousands of happy customers they had. It was totally free and was completely invisible on the page, since you don’t need to display a graphics or a back link on your site. They were not deleting the old data (as most stats services do) and the stats were also private. But what concerns me is that I have lost all the valuable stats data which was recorded till now by the service. Worst still, according to the comment by Nick, there is no way for me to export the stats data out of the system. 
Now the question which has popped up in my mind is “How safe is my data?” with the other (web 2.0) websites. So just for a wild imagination, what happens if Google gets dissolved or bought up like Performancing or goes bankrupt (Just imagine). My (digital) life may come to a standstill without access to my email (gmail) and schedules (Calendar). And what if the same fate happens to Yahoo, I will loose all my bookmarks (del.icio.us), my old emails (Yahoo Mail), my photos (flickr and Yahoo photos) etc. Well, it gets too shocking. Isn’t it? Worst still what happens if they say, pay $XXX to get access to your data?
This leaves me with lot of questions and also with some shock. But back to the original problem, now I have to look out for a new Metrics/Stats package. I am not able to decide whether I have to go for a 3rd party package (like Feedburner, Google Analytics etc) or install my own copy in my server (like Mint, Analog, Awstats etc). Guys do you have any recommendations?
Posted in Google/Yahoo, Random/Personal
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Tagged Metrics, PayPerPost, Performancing, stats
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