Flaggies
I don’t blog much. I know.
I’d actually much rather spend the time working the technical stuff on my blog than actually posting entries. I can’t help it… being a nerd and all.
Of course you wouldn’t have noticed it, but I’ve been installing different plugins and themes on my blog so that I can get to learn the inner workings of Wordpress. They’re deactivated now. But I’ve come a long way since my first experience with Wordpress.
I’ve been having fun with one particular Wordpress plugin, FireStats. It’s a brilliant plugin. It displays awesome statistics about the users that visit your blog. An additional feature is that it displays little icons about the users that comment on your blog. Three icons: flag of his country, his operating system and his browser. Something like this:
Francois
says: This is a great post!
Now I can see in detail who still use Internet Explorer 6!
Anyway, I installed the plugin on Theo’s blog. You can see in the cute icons in comments section. At first almost none of the South African flaggies were showing. The plugin detects the user’s IP address and does a lookup in a local database. Unfortunately very few of the South African IP ranges were in the database. After I googled the missing .za ranges, it took me a lot of sweating hours to get them into the database. It wasn’t a normal insert. Most of the ranges were already “assigned” to the USA in database. I had to reassign the South African ranges, keeping the ranges to the left and right of it still assigned to the USA.
But it was worth it, and it is really interesting to see where the users come from. I could also deduce that Saudis like to post spam regarding casinos and Russians are more inclined to promote the XXX industry!
I’m now working to make a part of Theo’s statistics available on a public page, since they are so interesting. Of course it would be unethical to reveal the actual IPs, so I have to write a page that excludes that part.
I’ll keep you posted.
Tagged as wordpress+ Categorized as Technology