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A request for help: wordpress stats

In case any of my viewers knows anything about wordpress … I just posted this support request over at wordpress.org:

I am using v1.1.1 of the WordPress.com stats plugin. Since I installed it (on the 30th of January), the statistics I see on wordpress.com have been odd, to say the least.

I realise that what I see on wordpress.com stats does not include my own page views, so those stats ought to be lower than the total views.

Here are the stats thus-far for February via wordpress.com: http://john.barrdear.com/stuff/wordpress_stats.jpg

Here are the stats for the same period from my host: http://john.barrdear.com/stuff/site_stats.jpg

For example, wordpress.com thinks that my “Beaten to the punch” post has seen 13 hits, but my host reports 3 views (1 entry, 1 exit).

What appears (to me) to be happening is that wordpress.com is recording hits to several posts against just one post.

As another example, my site gets aggregated here: http://ozpolitics.info/feeds. When someone clicks on the link on that page, they come through to the post-specific page on my site. WordPress.com stats are recognising ozpolitics.info/feeds as the referrer, but not the post-specific page as a hit.

Here is a specific example: http://john.barrdear.com/stuff/stat_inconsistency.jpg

Notice that yesterday I got two referrals from ozpolitics.info/feeds. I only had two articles listed on the ozpolitics feed yesterday: “Idle Curiosity” and “Sweating the small stuff”, neither of which is listed as getting a hit in yesterday’s posts.

If anyone out there has any clue what might be happening, please let me know, either here or on the wordpress.org site.  Thanks.

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Justifying my continued existance

… as a blogger [*], that is.

Via Alex Tabarrok (with two r’s), I note that the National Library of Medicine (part of the NIH) is now providing guidelines on how to cite a blog.

There are the ongoing calls for more academic bloggers and, while there are certainly questions over incentives and the impact on research productivity, academia continues to dip the odd toe in the water. Justin Wolfers just did a week of it at Marginal Revolution and now I see this brief post by Joshua Gans:

As more evidence that blogging is going mainstream, a bunch of faculty at Harvard Business School are now in on the act (including economist Pankaj Ghemawat)

[*] I didn’t think it was possible for me to dislike any word more than I do “blog,” but it turns out that I do. To call myself “blogger” required a supression of my own gag reflex.

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Upgrading wordpress + theme

Apologies for the mess … I’ve upgraded to v2.2.2 of WordPress and moved over to K2 for my theme. If anyone has a recommendation for a K2 style I might use, let me know.

You should notice a few largely-pointless-but-still-pretty-cool AJAX features appearing over the next few days and weeks.

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My entry into the world of blogs and web 2.0

In a recent outing to the pub, a couple of friends noted that we were three computer professionals without any real web presense. We might have attempted the odd static site over the years, but none of us had really embraced the whole web 2.0 thing. Realising that this is an embarrassing state of affairs, wanting some sort of common place to store my (public) thoughts and since economists all seem to blog these days anyway, I figured to give it a shot.

Hopefully it won’t turn into another empty, never-updated affair. 🙂

I’ve also created accounts on Facebook and Myspace, although both accounts are really just stubs at this point. I notice that facebook allows me to publish this blog directly into my facebook account (in the notes area), which is nice. Myspace seems to only allows me to publish (subscribe) to other blogs on myspace.

Are there any other networking sites I ought to be signing on to?