University of Melbourne Blogs

For the second time, we’ve become aware of performance issues on the unimelb blog site traceable to the Firestats plugin. When we first installed Firestats two years ago it was indicated that it would only remain available as long as it didn’t interfere with the rest of the site, unfortunately, this time, we’ve decided to remove the plugin in the next week or so. An email will be sent out to all blog users when we know more precisely.

We don’t expect this to cause any major problems – the reports generated by Firestats were not terribly useful, but we do recognise that they were at least something. However, as many users who run blogs also run websites that have Google Analytics, we’re going to recommend from now on, that this is the preferred method for gathering stats.

But how to install Google Analytics?

Easy! Whether you already have an account/profile that you want to use, or are planning to start a new account, all you need is the tracking code from your Analytics account, then:

1. Get into your blog admin interface and head for Appearance -> Widgets.
2. Create a new text widget by dragging the button to the bottom of one of your sidebars.
3. Leave the title blank, paste the code into the widget and save.
4. That’s it!

If you already have a text widget in one of your sidebars, then, of course you can add the google code to that, it’s entirely up to you.

I suggest you use the new ‘Asynchronous’ code. Sure, the widget isn’t in the head, or the foot of the page, so there’s a likelihood that you might miss a tiny percentage of hits because people move on before the page loads fully, but this is likely to be negligible.

We hope in the near future to be making more plugins available, opening the door to tighter google analytics integration. Fingers crossed!