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With the debacle of Sitemeter crashing my site over the weekend, I vowed to get different tools to monitor visitors, hitcounts and referrals. I wanted to look at WordPress plugins for the blogs and as a suggestion from Frankie, have a look at Woopra.

So I did both. I installed WordPress.Com Stats by Skeltoac, which is a stat counter that runs under the WordPress dashboard. It tracks top entry pages, referrals and number of visitors, all of which I will be using to help me target my Adsense ads to help increase my Ad payout. It provides a great dashboard for first glance information, and best of all, its not reliant upon a third party like SiteMeter. A screenshot of the Stats is below:

One thing the Stats plugin does not do is track IP addresses, which I think is important from an information security perspective.

So to add to the Stats plugin, I also installed Woopra. Woopra is an advanced real-time view into your webserver logs that not only tracks the items that WordPress Stats does, but also tracks Geographic location of your visitors, IP address, and even allows you to initiate a chat with the visitors through a java popup window.

The Woopra application also works off of a WordPress plugin, but the client application actually runs from the desktop, not the server. This makes the applet fast, which it needs to power its numerous features. The program is in beta now and is full-featured. You can go sign up here.

In addition to these two WordPress plugins, I decided to go Old School with my logs. I mean 1995 Old School. I downloaded the free version of WebLog Expert, a web log analyzing tool. I tweaked my log rotation so I can keep larger logfiles for each week and now batch-download them for offline analysis as well. You can get WebLog Expert Lite here. Its a great utility and its free.