It’s great having a few hours up your sleeve because I’ve been able to really have a play around with some the features of Vista. This weekend I’m beginning to play around with speech recognition capabilities of Microsoft Windows Vista.

So far its performance is not far from that of Dragon Naturally Speaking. In fact, its performance may be slightly better because the commands and instructions that you give the computer seem a little bit more intuitive than those of its competitor. I am writing this entry now using Vista speech recognition although it is taking a little bit of time as I get used to the different commands and ways of talking to the computer.

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I think that the StatTraq solution is looking most promising. SlimStats is also very good, but the layout of StatTraq reporting is more understandable for me. Particularly in the collation of most read posts. This is really where you are wanting to see results most of the time. I need an ‘at-a-glance’ look at what posts are getting the most hits and StatTraq does this in a very easy way. SlimStats also can do this but it takes a few more clicks to get there.

So both solutions are very close and it comes down to a matter of personal preference. There is one trick with StatTraq that you’ll need to implement if you are using the long version of permalinks (e.g., domain/category/post_title as opposed to domain/?=p34), which is not well explained on the plugin’s web site but happily is very well covered by Evan Dodds on this site.

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I’ve been playing around with a number of stats plug-ins at the moment and well, it’s all rather confusing to be honest. I have way too many little scripts running off GUB, but I’m trying to work out what’s best. I am using statcounter and that is proving to vary wildly with the information that I’m getting out of StatTraq.

I’m also looking at wp-slimstats and Google Analytics.

I haven’t really reached any conclusions yet, other than statcounter gives you a very low result and StatTraq gives a higher result. Google sits somewhere in the middle and I haven’t really been using wp-slimstats long enough to tell.

What is plainly apparent is that they all have pros and cons. Continue reading →

I have managed to install ip2nation and its associated WordPress plugin. It took a little bit of fiddling but then I am pretty much PHP challenged! You can scroll down on any page and find it in the left side bar.

The trickiest part was making it work with wp-useronline from Lester Chan. It was possible but it took a bit of tweaking to get the thing to work with ip2nation code from Planet OZH.

But both of them are now working and look okay. I was also trying to get a flag to display per user online, but so far haven’t been able to achieve that. This can be done in the useronline page function, but I haven’t seen it in the sidebar. Maybe it’s not possible. Continue reading →