Click image to go to Google Analytics

Google Analytics allows you to monitor the traffic to your website(s) and/or blog(s). It helps you keep track of how many users have visited, the average number of page visits per user session, the average time a visitor stays on your site and much more. It’s a great tool, but it would be nice to not have to go outside of WordPress, and open another browser window, to go to Google Analytics to check your statistics.

That’s where Google Analytics Dashboard enters. It allows you to check your stats right from the WordPress Dashboard without ever leaving your blog. See the image below:

Not only can you check stats from your WordPress Dashboard, each page and post has it’s on analytics count. See the image below:

To get started, you must first sign up with Google Analytics and register your blog. Once you’ve gotten your unique code, include it in the source code of your blog. If you’re not absolutely sure where you’re suppose to include your code, and there are no explicit instructions you can use to figure it out, try the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin. It’s really simple.

Once you’ve included your Google Analytics code in your blog, download and install the Google Analytics Dashboard plugin.

Click on the WordPress Settings option and then find and click on Google Analytics Dashboard from the list. Enter your Google Analytics (not WordPress) username and password, and you will then be taken to another screen that will allow you to make choices to customize your preferences.

That’s it.

Go back to your WordPress Dashboard and find the Google Analytics Dashboard widget box. It’s probably going to be at the bottom of the page. If it’s not in the best location for you, don’t forget that you can reorder and organize your WordPress Dashboard to fit your needs. See WordPress Tip #3: Can I Change the Way My Dashboard Looks? for more information.

Happy stats, good people.

There are several link-shortening applications (tinyurl, budurl, and bit.ly) available for microblogging (blogging in a limited number of characters, like Twitter).

One of the applications I use is bit.ly, and I did a Social Media Spotlight about it, because it allows the tracking and analysis of all the links you shorten with the application.

Well, then I discovered the WordPress plugin Pretty Link while looking for a plugin to do something totally different. It also allows for tracking and analysis of links, but I like it because it allows me to create short URLs with my own domain, which itself is a pretty short URL (myqotd.com) .

The following information is from the developer’s site:

Features

• Gives you the ability to create clean, simple URLs on your website that redirect to any other URL
• Generates random 2-3 character slugs for your URL or allows you to name a custom slug for your URL
• Tracks the Number of Hits per link
• Tracks the Number of Unique Hits per link
• Provides a reporting interface where you can see a configurable chart of clicks per day. This report can be filtered by the specific link clicked, date range, and/or unique clicks.
• View click details including ip address, remote host, browser (including browser version), operating system, and referring site
• Download hit details in CSV format
• Intuitive Javascript / AJAX Admin User Interface
• Pass custom parameters to your scripts through pretty link and still have full tracking ability
• Ability to rewrite these custom Parameters before forwarding to Target URL
• Setup Pretty Links as Tracking Pixels and track impressions
• Exclude IP Addresses from Stats
• Enables you to post your Pretty Links to Twitter directly from your WordPress admin
• Enables you to send your Pretty Links via Email directly from your WordPress admin
• Select Temporary (307) or Permanent (301) redirection for your Pretty Links
• Cookie based system for tracking visitor activity across hits
• Organize Links into Groups
• Create nofollow/noindex links
• Turn tracking on / off on each link
• Keep users on your site even when being redirected by using the PrettyBar which stays at the top of the page
• Configure the PrettyBar to mirror the look and feel of your website

Great things you can do with Pretty Link

• Clean up / mask affiliate links or merchant shopping cart links
• Track the effectiveness of email campaigns by embedding Pretty Links in your emails
• See how many times an email is opened by creating a “Tracking Pixel” Pretty Link and embedding it in the email
• Kickstart and Fuel the SEO on your site by posting Pretty Links from your site on Digg, Twitter, Facebook, other blogs and everywhere else on the Internet.
• Create Pretty Links for private special offers (to your email list) using a randomized slug to prevent the URL from being “guessed”
• Write custom scripts in PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP or anything else that accept parameters and use Pretty Link to make their URLs “pretty” and forward on the parameters
• Setup pretty links for your zip, pdf & binary files and track how many times they are downloaded
• Use to track results of your PPC campaigns by setting your ads to go to Pretty Links
• Track Everything!

There’s also a Pretty Link Pro for which you can pay a fee to gain more features.

Let me know if you upload Pretty Link to your blog and how it works for you!

I found out this information the hard way, so hopefully it will save someone else the trouble that it caused me.

If you, for any reason, have to reload the contents of your blog from a database backup, the second thing you need to do after you install the WordPress platform, and before you import the backed up content into MySQL, is re-install any plugins you were previously using.

Some plugins make tables in your database. When you try to reconnect the database with the new install of WordPress, it’s going to be looking for the plugins that go with the extra database tables. If it can’t find them, your blog isn’t going to show correctly (or at all) in the browser.

You may want to consider keeping a file that lists all your plugins, especially if you have a habit of installing straight from WordPress and not downloading the plugins to your computer first.

I know I have more than one or two plugins, so why does the number next to “Plugins” on my WordPress Dashboard not reflect the five, six, ten, twelve plugins on my blog? That confused me too, until I did a little research.

When you see the orange number next to your word “Plugins,” it simply means that’s the number of plugins that have updates available. Click on “Plugins,” and you’ll see a yellow band at the bottom of the plugin and/or plugins that need to be updated.

You can choose to download the plugin or to update automatically. I usually just update automatically. It saves time. However, you may want to download the plugin and update automatically, especially if you have a folder where you keep all your plugins in case you have to reload one or more and they aren’t available in the WordPress Extend directory anymore. You may also decide to use that particular plugin on another of your blogs, and  you’ll have it downloaded to your personal storage for quick access.

MAKE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR BLOG BEFORE UPDATING ANY PLUGINS. Most often, this is an unecessary precaution, but the one time you should have backed up and you didn’t, thinking “It’ll be OK,” will be the one time it’s not OK. Don’t take chances with your content. Make sure to create a backup before you update plugins, themes or even the WordPress application itself. All my blogs use the WordPress Database Backup, which can be found in the WordPress Extend directory.