I’ve been having a little bit of fun with the Counterize II plugin.  I’ve suspected for a while that the WP-Shortstat plugin may not be entirely reliable – I’ve run concurrently with a couple of other stats plugins and Shortstat has consistently short more hits than any of the others.  Now I’m running Shortstat and Counterize concurrently and deciding that Counterize is probably far more accurate.  For one thing it actually shows me the IP addresses of folks who surf through here, and I have all these pretty little charts tracking traffic.  For a stats geek like me, that’s pretty darn nifty.  Counterize also has this nice little option to click for a geographic location by IP, though as I discovered last night, it’s not wholly accurate – my home IP showed up as being several states away, which is actually pretty ok by me.  But I do get a general idea of what countries people who see my site are in.  So far, I’ve seen IPs from all around the world – Singapore, Sweden, Denmark, Thailand, Korea, and the USA, just to name a few.  It’s truly fascinating.

Unfortunately, I’ve also had to disable a different plugin.  I like trackbacks.  I don’t get a lot of them on my site – I apparently don’t inspire much in the way of follow-up discussion.  But I have noticed that what trackbacks I should be getting (Technorati is actually pretty good about showing me folks who link back to me) haven’t been making it through, even into my spam folder.  Turns out, the trouble is with the Trackback Validator plugin I was running.  It’s supposed to sort out just the spam trackbacks, but instead it seems to have been catching all trackbacks and blocking them, which is just completely unacceptable.  So, I’ve turned that one off.  Akismet has always provided a very adequate level of spam protection, so I’m willing to let that plugin go it alone.  Why ‘fix’ it if it ain’t broke?