If you want statistical information about your blog, from a period earlier than WordPress provide under “Blog Stats” all you need to do is add

&enddate=07-06-01

[year, month, day] (without quotation marks) to the URL.  This only works on the “Top Posts” page.

Although WordPress.com offers statistics to bloggers on their “Blog Stats” page, mostly you are only offered information for the past week.  The one aberration is the “Top Posts” page that shows stats for the previous 30 days. 

It is here that you can manipulate the URL to access data for an earlier period of time.

If I go click on the “Top Posts” link on my “Blog Stats” page, and view the summary for the past 30 days, I get this information:

If I want to look at my top posts, and how many times they were accessed for the 30 days preceding April 1, 2007, I type

“&enddate=07-04-01” (without the quotation marks) at the end of the URL - and - voila!
 

More information is available at WordPress.com FAQ’s:

Questions about stats

Blog Stats

Automattic Kismet ( Akismet for short), is open source software that deals with spam in comments and trackbacks on blogs. 

The product is brilliant and has caught most of the comment spam on my WordPress blog, but, as is annoyingly typical, the bad guys have worked out the tricks.  [Don’t think for one minute that this makes the bad guys smarter than us; it’s just they get to see what we're doing, we don’t get to see what they are doing - until they’ve done it!]

The way the bad guys are getting around Akismet is by writing short, sweet, and generic comments such as “Hi, very good site”

I’m not sure about other blogging software, but within WordPress, there is an option to moderate comments which I have turned on, and it offers me the above information, asking me whether I want to approve it, or treat it as spam before it is posted.  At a glance, I can easily see that it is spam and delete it.

So for now, I’m getting help from WordPress in dealing with it, but I have much faith in the worlds number 1 Matt and Akismet; they’ll work out a solution - fast!

More about this on SEO Black Hat.

Launch of Soyuz TMA-9, Source: NASA

I had the pleasure of meeting  the world’s number one Matt earlier this week; Matt Mullenweg, of WordPress fame, and founder of Automattic, the company behind all great things–like Akismet–sat down with me at Pier 38 for a Tech Talk Radio story about the collaborative Web. 

During our chat, I learned much, but I thought this was just too great to wait!

Anousheh Ansari, the first female private space explorer, made history in September 2006 as the first person to blog from space. 

The Iranian born American businesswoman blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, as part of the Expedition 14 crew of the Soyuz TMA-9, to spend nine days on the International Space Station. 

Ansari, who returned with the Expedition 13 crew, makes history as the first person to blog from space, describing life in zero gravity and interacting with her supporters on planet Earth; her Website and blog received in excess of 50 million hits from readers around the world.

But…

Did you know? 

Ansari’s blog software of choice?  WordPress!

The full interview with Matt will go to air in the land down under on the 27th May, which, incidentally, is the 4th Birthday of WordPress, so don’t forget to send out your Congrats!

The podcast will be available the following day at Tech Talk.
 

If you want a successful blog, you need traffic. If you want traffic you need to understand how search engines relate to you as well as your competitors.

Although many of these sites require that you have your own URL, e.g. blogwell.com instead of blogwell.wordpress.com, all of them offer lots of other useful information. Best of all – they are free.

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