Big (and little) changes are brewing for my blog. These are slated to include a new custom built theme, a possible name change, better Search Engine Optimization (SOE) and better analytical tools to track visitors (or lack there of). To get the ball rolling I’ve installed the Piwik Web Analytics tool to track visitors to the site. Here is a little more detail about this interesting tool.
Piwik in the developers words “… aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.” To this end it offers a slick and visually appealing user interface. The real down side to this approach (and imho all tools of this ilk) is the requirement that you place Javascript code on every page that you want to track. Normally I would not bother with this, except for the magic of WordPress.
Enter Jules, a Dutch Piwik user, who has built a WordPress plug-in for Piwik. The plug-in can be found on the official WordPress Plug-in site at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/piwik-analytics/. You can get more details and guidance on Jules’ blog at http://blog.jongbelegen.net/piwik-analytics/. The plug-in adds the necessary Javascript to the footer of every WordPress generated page so there is no need to manually edit template pages or other foolishness. As long as the wp_footer method is called in your template footer page (preferably right before the ending body tag) you are good to go.
So far I was able to install and successfully test the plug-in. The next step will be to wait for a period of time and then see what if any traffic is coming to my blog site. One early concern that I have is Piwik does not appear to track data on search engine spiders. I will have to keep an eye on the regular visitor data to see if this is mingled in with the other visits. It would be nice to have this separated out, but I can’t complain too much for such a polished free tool.
I’ll share my impressions on Piwik in a later post. Also please keep watching for additional changes to the site. They may take a while to put in place, but I will keep plugging away until I’m satisfied with the results.
