Motherfuton™

Now, all three of my readers are probably saying to themselves.

What the Futon is Shortstat?

Who the Futon is Shaun Inman?

Why is the sky blue?

Well, Shortstat is a way of tracking your sites statistics via the genius that is Shaun Inman.

Shaun Inman is a very smart man. With an eye for good design.

The blue color of the sky is due to Rayleigh scattering. As light moves through the atmosphere, most of the longer wavelengths pass straight through. Little of the red, orange and yellow light is affected by the air. However, much of the shorter wavelength light is absorbed by the gas molecules. The absorbed blue light is then radiated in different directions. It gets scattered all around the sky. Whichever direction you look, some of this scattered blue light reaches you. Since you see the blue light from everywhere overhead, the sky looks blue.

I heard about shortstat, and after reading a bit about it, I decided to try it out for myself. Installation was pretty straight forward, but I felt that it was missing a few key things. So I thought I would lay out the basics here for anyone Goolging for a quick tutorial on how to install Shortstat.

This is by no means intended to be an end all of tutorials. I just hoped to document a few things that I got hung up on when installing, in hopes that others could avoid the frustration I faced.

Step 1. Download Shortstat from Shaun Inman's site here.

Step 2. Follow Shaun's clear six step instructions on how to configure Shortstat for your server. These steps assume a couple of things.

A) That you create a new database for Shortstat to use - this is what you enter in during Step 1 of Shaun's instructions. The server is of course, your domain, and the username and password are for the new database that you created.

B) Timezone Offset - According to my Shortstat, my three readers are all from the US of A. So popular timezone offset's are as follows: PST : -8 , MST : -7, CST : -6 and EST : -5 (this is default in the file as I assume Shaun is from the East Coast)

Step 3. After you save your configuration.php file with the changes you just made, continue to follow Shaun's instructions and upload the entire Shortstat directory to your server, and run the _install.php.

Step 4. When you finish with Step 6 of Shaun's instructions if you ping your site a few times, and do NOT see anything in your Shortstat, chances are your PHP include stated in Shaun's Step 5 did not get included on your page, OR your pages are in .htm format as opposed to .php. If this is the case, you can either do two things.

A) Set up a .htaccess file on your server to have it handle your php includes...

B) Change your pages to the .php extension

I opted for option B. This worked beautifully for me, and now I can track all three of my readers with ease.

The steps that I detailed here are the ones that hung me up a bit, and hopefully this can help you get through those issues if you are facing them as well.

Good luck, and be sure to thanks Shaunsometime for his great work on Shortstat.

I wrote this a while back, but never pushed it live for one reason or another. Now it seems with Tiger coming out, the kids at The Big Noob have developed a widget for Shortstat. So in the spirit of Shortstat and Tiger and Widgets, I decided to post this for all the little people... err, I mean ... uh...

Post #21