For this, you will need:

1. A blog running WordPress.
2. The JetPack plugin installed.
3. The ability to edit your themes.

Here's the snippet of code I'm using to add "This post has been read 12,345 times". I'll explain how it works in a bit more detail.

if( function_exists( 'stats_get_csv' ) ) {
     $stats_query = "page_stats_for_" . get_the_ID();

     if ( false === ( $special_query_results = get_transient( $stats_query ) ) ) {
       $stat_options = "post_id=".get_the_ID()."&days=-1";
       $post_stats = stats_get_csv( 'postviews', $stat_options );
       $special_query_results = $post_stats[0]["views"];
       set_transient( $stats_query, $special_query_results, 6 * HOUR_IN_SECONDS );
     }

     if (($special_query_results != null) && ($special_query_results > 100))
     {
       echo "This post has been read " . number_format($special_query_results) . " times.";
     }
}

Let's start from the inside out...

Get Your Stats

The call to stats_get_csv() is a wrapper for https://stats.wordpress.com/csv.php.

If you want to see the stats for the post with ID 123 you'd need to call:

https://stats.wordpress.com/csv.php?
   api_key=abcxyz&
   blog_uri=example.com&
   post_id=123&
   days=-1&
   table=postviews&
   format=txt

The days parameter can be set to whatever you like - so 7 for the last week. When set to -1, it will return data back to the beginning of time.

To call this in a PHP function, we use:

$post_stats = stats_get_csv( 'postviews', "post_id=123&days=-1" );

This brings back an array, so to access the number of views:

$views = $post_stats[0]["views"];

So, putting it all together, we get:

$stat_options = "post_id=".get_the_ID()."&days=-1";
$post_stats = stats_get_csv( 'postviews', $stat_options );
$views = $post_stats[0]["views"];

Caching

Once we've got the stats, it's sensible to cache them. WordPress recommends a minimum cache of 180 seconds. Given that each call can add around 3 seconds of latency, I think it's wise to cache for several hours.

We'll cache this with the Transients API - a lightweight way to store data semi-permanently.

To store some data for six hours, we use:

set_transient( 'reference_to_data', $data, 6 * HOUR_IN_SECONDS );

We're going to want to store a different result for every post:

set_transient( "page_stats_for_" . get_the_ID(), $views, 6 * HOUR_IN_SECONDS );

To get the data about a specific page, we call

get_transient( "page_stats_for_123" );

Put it all together, and you get:

if( function_exists( 'stats_get_csv' ) ) {
     $stats_query = "page_stats_for_" . get_the_ID();

     if ( false === ( $special_query_results = get_transient( $stats_query ) ) ) {
       $stat_options = "post_id=".get_the_ID()."&days=-1";
       $post_stats = stats_get_csv( 'postviews', $stat_options );
       $special_query_results = $post_stats[0]["views"];
       set_transient( $stats_query, $special_query_results, 6 * HOUR_IN_SECONDS );
     }

     if (($special_query_results != null) && ($special_query_results > 100))
     {
       echo "This post has been read " . number_format($special_query_results) . " times.";
     }
}

This snippet can be placed in your theme wherever you want a page view to appear.

He presents a pie chart showing how the police force spend its money. Take a look at it and ask yourself this question: what percentage is spent on "Employees".

Please use this poll to record your guess - answers at the end of this blog.

Pie charts have a long and noble history. They were popularised by Florence Nightingale and were hugely effective in helping politicians understand the causes of death among soldiers during the Crimean War.

As we understand more about the human brain and how we perceive shapes, it is becoming clear that pie charts are ineffective for representing complex information.

2D pie charts can still serve a useful purpose in limited circumstances. The real problem is with 3D pie charts. As far as I can tell, these abominations were popularised by Microsoft's Excel charting software.

3D charts distort the view of the data in such a way that it becomes increasingly hard to understand the information being presented. A picture being worth 1000 words, allow me to demonstrate:

So, just how bad is Surrey Police's Pie Chart? In an extremely scientific study of asking half a dozen people, they all guessed between 75% and 85%. That's quite a wide range considering it's a multi-million pound difference.

On the opposite page to the pie chart is this summary of spending.

In slightly more readable format, it is:

A few interesting things to note here.

Firstly, how do we calculate the percentages? The total spend isn't mentioned in the report (£216.90). If we use that, "Employees" accounts for 81.9% of spending.

If we take into account the gross expenditure (£207.70) the figure jumps to 87.5%.

Secondly, if we do assume that we're using the unreported total spend - there is at least 2% missing. Some of which can be explained by rounding - but I wonder what the rest of the money is spent on.

Given the above, I don't think the provided pie chart allows Surrey residents to see an accurate view of how their hard earned money is being spent.

Hopefully, this side-by-side - of the above data - will show you how 3D pie charts distort data and end up misleading their audience.

With this overlay, we can see the distortion much more clearly. The smaller sections of the chart look disproportionately larger. It's time to announce a zero tolerance crackdown on dodgy data representation.

I started this month hoping to average 1,000 page views per day. This was so I could hit the (pretty arbitrary) milestone of half a million page views.

This is what my November looked like...

Which means my total stats since 2009 are...

So, let me take you through what I learned.

When You Help Others - You're Really Only Helping Yourself

I've been badgering my wife constantly to write on her blog. I managed to convince her to partake in NaNoBloMo and she has done marvellously. I've been seriously impressed with her writing and her dedication. It has been great seeing her struggle with the challenge and having it pay off so magnificently.

People Are Stupid

I just wasn't able to put this adequately into words until my wife blogged, but some people really are stupid. I've been told that my arguments are invalid because (in no particular order)...

• I haven't calculated something to N decimal places
• I have an obvious anti-Apple bias
• I have an obvious anti-Android bias
• I used hyperbole
• I mistakenly claimed something took X months, when it actually took X+1 months

In short, people seem to ignore the bigger picture, find the smallest and most inconsequential mistake, and then use that to hang an entire argument. Predictable, I guess, but a little depressing.

I could try to write everything in formal language, perhaps written in pure predicate logic, and illustrated with examples backed up by no less than 9 separate sources - but I have the feeling that would be a little dull to read. There must be a middle ground somewhere.

You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk

I hate being told I'm wrong. Especially by anonymous commentators. By contrast, I love being told I'm right. Especially by anonymous commentators.

It's a weird experience to see strangers praising and damning you in - so it seems - equal measure. Bad reviews stick around in your brain far more than the good ones.

Interestingly, when I've tackled the anonymous people saying I'm an idiot, they've either apologised straight away - or run away.

Bandwidth

May 12, 2012 held the record for the busiest day - 17,186 views thanks to this article about the SIM-less Phone.

My ecosystem blogpost got 37,776 views on November 23rd. The 24th of November saw it get 51,928 views!

Which was nice.

Luckily, my blog is heavily cached and has gzip compression turned on - but even still, I started getting alerts from my host that I was edging close to the limits of my agreed bandwith. So, I bought some more.

My hosting provider - Vidahost - stayed rock solid even at the height of the traffic. They were incredibly quick to respond to my questions and even gave me some free bandwidth while I was waiting to see if the traffic would continue growing.

Tomorrow Never Knows

I was completely stunned by the posts which "made it" and those which fizzled into obscurity. I thought both the one about the HackerNews Effect and Why Don't Amazon Sell ePubs would do rather better than they did.

I don't know if they contained poor ideas, weren't well written, or just didn't get promoted properly. But, there we are.

Don't Hold Back

The majority of posts were written over the last two years. One was even three years old! They'd all been sat in the draft state waiting for me to be happy with them.

The Smuggling USB sticks post was my first big "hit" of this NaloPoMo - it got 22,553 views in a single day! Yet it was first written in 2010 after the BPI threatened to sue me. I'm not really sure why I sat on it for so long...

So, the moral is either "publish those posts before they get too old" or, alternatively, "Let those old posts mature like a fine wine."

Forward, Never Backward

I'm not sure if I can keep up with Richard Herring in blogging every day - although I do have a few posts lined up for December. It's been a fun - and slightly stressful - November, so perhaps it's time to take a short break.

Thanks for reading!

When I started this month, I looked at the blog's statistics and decided I wanted to get 30,000 views in the month of November. I normally average 600 views per day. So, how to get that up to 1,000 per day?

I had two main strategies (other than writing interesting and engaging content.

1. Share my posts on social networks - letting my friends know that I'd published something.
2. Submit my posts to external sites - use HackerNews or Reddit to share my writing.

I used the JetPack Publicize plugin to send my content to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

For external sites, I thought that Y Combinator's HackerNews was the best destination for some of my posts.

My first post - about smuggling USB sticks - was submitted at 1300GMT on Sunday 11th November and, fairly quickly, made it to the front page as readers upvoted it. Near as I can tell, it remained on the front page for 24 hours.

So, 216 points and 93 comments on HackerNews resulted in roughly 30,000 extra visitors.

You can see a graph of the performance throughout the day on Hacker News Rankings.

My next successful post was about the antics of Helen Goodman MP and her self-proclaimed inability to use the Internet.

I figured 1300GMT on a Friday was a good time to submit again. It catches UK workers having or returning from lunch - and it's 0800 on the East Coast of the USA, so catches commuters there.

The post stayed on the front page for roughly 12 hours before dropping off. The blog got 112 points and 103 comments. It netted roughly an extra 12,000 visitors.

Again, you can see a graph of the performance throughout the day on Hacker News Rankings. The majority of these visitors came directly from HackerNews - but people obviously started sharing the posts on Twitter, Facebook, and via newsletters.

Once the fuss had died down, these were the sites which sent my blog the most traffic.

Now, not every story I've submitted has done so well. Most have never even troubled the front page. I obviously haven't yet hit on the winning formula of decent content, inflammatory headline, and serendipitous timing.

As an extremely rough metric, every hour on the front page of HackerNews was worth around 700 page views. It's too early to say whether that has lead to a pronounced increase in my regular visitor numbers.

I don't have adverts on my blog, although I do have Amazon affiliate links. They netted me a total of £4.04. I also encouraged a bunch of people to join the Open Rights Group, which has put me in the running to win a MaKey MaKey

A special "thank you" to my hosting provider - Vidahost. They stayed rock solid even as I received over a month's worth of traffic in a single day.

On Friday, October 30, 2009, I switched on WordPress statistics so I could get a better idea of what was popular on my site. My average traffic back then was 80 visits per day. Not bad for a backwater blog.

Since then, my writing has been getting better (I hope), my content has become more interesting, and I've had several stories which have spread far and wide.

The blog now gets ~600 visits per day.

What I find interesting is that it's some of the older posts which get the most regular traffic. This post about getting Android to run on Nokia phones is often in my "top ten" list - despite being published over three years ago.

May 12, 2012 was the busiest day with 17,186 views thanks to this article about the SIM-less Phone.

Arbitrary Milestones

I'm not sure how accurate the stats are, but since they were set up (two years after this blog started) I've had 470,034 views in total.

So, my goal is to get to the half million mark. Hopefully by the end of NaBloPoMo or, more realistically, by the end of 2012.

Here we go!

Facebook has, in its infinite wisdom, decided that I would be interested in adverts for cancer. Or, perhaps, AXA have decided that 30 something males are a prime market.

The creator of the advert was Equator's Fiona Dow who, judging from her bitly profile just loves posting about cancer.

As I have mentioned several times before, bitly links are a great way to (unintentionally) share your stats. If we look at the clickthrough stats for this advert, we can find some interesting nuggets.

Here's the biggie - referrers shows where people where when they clicked on the link:

In total, nearly half of all clicks came from the mobile site.

Perhaps this is why Facebook hasn't jumped into bed with any dedicated mobile advertiser? It would seem that users are equally willing to click on Facebook's "Sponsored Stories" on mobile as well as web.

(This assumes that AXA targetted both platforms equally).

The only fly in the ointment is, you guessed it, AXA don't have a mobile friendly site.

I've been banging on about mobile-friendly advertising for years - and still advertisers don't get it! Not everyone has an iPhone. Not everyone who has an iPhone is on WiFi or 3G. Not every one want to have to pinch and zoom. If the first impression you're giving your customers is that you don't care about their needs - don't expect them to stick around too long.

So based on this datum, Facebook users are willing to click on mobile ads - all it now requires is Facebook to show them at appropriate times and advertisers to create mobile-dedicated campaigns.

sigh A non-mobile site. With an Adobe Flash plugin in the top right which won't work on any iPhones. Why on Earth do marketing companies insist on pointing phones to non-mobile sites. It really bemuses me. Stations rarely have good signal (too many people leads to local network congestion) and, besides, large sites are a right pig to use on a small screen.

Stats

I've blogged several times about using Bit.ly links in QR codes. With a little bit of hacking (adding at + character to the end of the URL) we can see how many people have been scanning the code.

I don't know how many of these tickets have been printed. That might be a really good conversion rate - but I doubt it. I only noticed the QR code because someone had dropped their ticket and it landed face-down. Realistically, how many people look at the back of their tickets?

The best campaign in the world would fail if it's not put in front of an audience.

A lot of comments on Twitter & Google+ dismissed these results as a success. A typical response was:

70 scans a day? In a city of millions? Rubbish!

This fails to address something that advertisers are conspicuously loathe to reveal - the true "response rate" of any advert is hard to calculate. How many phone calls, visits to a website, or SMS interactions are directly attributable to a regular poster? No one really knows - or, if they know, they're not telling.

For the first time, we're able to see how many people are reacting to an advert, scanning a code, and then visiting a site.

Currently, TfL's campaign is running at 5,000 scans per month - peaking at 259 scans on April 3rd.

Or, 16,000 in the last five months. With a rather nice growth in usage in the last few months.

Here come the nay-sayers....

But... But.... How many sites is that across? Millions of people, thousands of sites, only a few scans? Rubbish!

So, I performed a Freedom of Information request to TfL.

There were around 400 sites showing these posters in November. That may have changed by now.

Ideally, I would have liked TfL to have created a unique QR code for each poster. That way we could see Putney gets more scans than Waterloo, for example. But I appreciate the logistical difficulties of that!

Phone Use

We also get some interesting statistics about the makes of phones that Londoners use:

iPhone has surged ahead - at the expense of Android and BlackBerry. Windows Phone 7 still remains a minority sport.

Haterz Gonna H8

Frankly, I don't care too much what the doom-mongers say. Having over 16,000 responses to a poster campaign sounds like a success to me. And, best of all, the data is open for anyone to investigate.

If you disagree with me - I politely ask you to show your workings :-)

Looks like someone was listening! I spotted this poster at a tube station.

Nestled in the corner is a QR code pointing at the mobile bus countdown service!

This is a close-to-perfect use of QR.

• Points to a mobile site.
• Easy to scan code.
• Good call to action.

As I suggested in my original post, TfL could customise the code, or print a separate one for each bus stop. This is, however, an excellent start.

What's particularly useful is that TfL are using the goo.gl URL shortener - meaning we can see their statistics!

Statistics

There's a dearth of good quality QR statistics which are publicly available. What is available is often put through the lens of a marketing team. So it's particularly refreshing to get the data straight from the source.

One simply needs to append any goo.gl URL with a "+" in order to see the statistics.

Let's dive in!

Since their launch in November, the QR codes have been scanned 4,500 times. I don't know how many of these posters are up, but that seems like a pretty impressive number.

The graph from the last month shows the codes are being scanned around 70 times per day.

We can get a rough idea of what sort of phones Londoners use - or, at least, what those who use the buses use.

iPhone takes a significant chunk - although not the majority - with 45%. Android coming next at 28%. BlackBerry still has a strong showing among Londoners with 22%.

I'm unsure whether "Windows" is WP7 or the older "Windows Mobile". Either way, Nokia's market share has collapsed.

The next interesting thing to look at is which countries the users are from.

As expected, the majority are using UK SIMS.

This doesn't count visitors who are using a local SIM on their stay - but it's still interesting to see where tose whoa re prepared to pay roaming data charges are coming from. Who knew so many Lithuanians loved our bus system...?

As far as I can tell, the Google statistics don't actively prevent duplications - so one enthusiastic Lithuanian could have scanned the code 15 times.

The data aren't entirely rigorous - but do show some interesting trends for QR use in London.

Last year, I noticed this QR code as I passed through San Francisco Airport.

The code goes to a TSA site (albeit non-mobile), which is odd, as the TSA do have a capable mobile site.

What I find most curious is that the TSA are using the Goo.gl URL shortener.

This is a bad idea for two reasons.

1. How does a user know where the code is going to take them? The URL "goo.gl/Qrlx1" could lead literally anywhere. A security minded organisation should always use their own domain name when creating a QR code.
2. Google short URLs allow anyone to see your QR code's usage statistics.

So, let's see how the TSA checkpoint QR code does.

Interesting to note that there are a few people prepared to pay roaming data charges to view the site. I've no idea if this exact QR code is at other airports, but it's gathering around 80 scans per day.

You can read more about the TSA's use of QR codes at their press centre.

NA! BLO! PO! MO!

It sounds like a Judoon war cry - "Na Blo Po Mo!" But rather than legions from the Shadow Proclamation, it is an amassed horde of bloggers poised to do battle with the enemy.

Gentlemen - the enemy is us.

I noticed that I had averaged a blog post every few days in October - I wondered if I could beat that and still retain some vestige of quality. During BarCampLondon I heard Abizer talk about NaNoWriMo - while I didn't think I could manage a novel, I was fairly sure I could squeeze out a post every day.

This has been a crazy month for me. Between attending BarCamps, organising BarCamps, speaking at conferences, going to gigs and comedy shows, turning 30, helping launch #vf360 and taking a pensions training course - I wasn't sure I'd be able to make it.

I do most of my writing on the train and the tube. I've found that the BlackBerry's built in memopad is good enough for drafting posts. I use the official WordPress for BlackBerry application for submitting drafts. I usually apply formatting, add multimedia, and tidy the spelling on a PC at lunchtimes.

At the end of October, I installed BlogStats for WordPress.  It's quite daunting seeing how popular - or not - my writing is.  It certainly kept me motivated.

Blog Views

One thing I've found invaluable is the ability to schedule blog posts for publishing at specified times. This blog post, for example was started on the 9th of November and is scheduled to be published on the last day of November.

I'm very proud of some of my posts here - I certainly didn't start the month expecting to be interviewed by The Register.  I've become acutely aware of how my written and spoken style differ - and how I refine the former until it no longer resembles the latter.  Whereupon I hit delete and start again.

Other posts betray the pressures of writing every day.  Some are, if I'm honest, mere sketches of fuller articles.

Too often, I'd want to write about something timely - only to realise I'd already published an article that day.  "Best to save it for tomorrow," I'd think - only to change my mind when tomorrow came.

I've also shied away from writing some "profound" pieces.  I usually like to take my time - weeks or even months - over an idea. I like to wring meaning out of every sentence.  When faced with a daily deadline, that's all but impossible.

It's been really fun to see how many visitors I get - what's been more interesting is seeing older articles getting hits - Android on the N810 is a perenial favourite it seems.

Top Posts

The long tail is alive and well!

I don't think I'll keep up posting every day - but I will be making sure that when I think of some interesting and original content, I'll post it as soon as I can.

Until next year - NA BLO PO MO!

Yesterday morning I asked the Number 10 Downing Street web team if they could provide their statistics. I figured that the PM's website gets enough readers from a wide selection of the web community to give a fairly impartial measure of the popular web browsers.

Here's their (very quick) reply

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @10DowningStreet@downingstreet can you tell us how many Firefox/IE/Safari users visit the Number 10 website? Would be really helpful to UK web developers

---

UK Prime Minister

@10DowningStreet

Replying to @edent@edent Top are: IE7 22%, IE8 20%, IE6 12%, Firefox3.5.3 9%, FF3.5.2 7%, FF3.0.14 5%, FF3.0.13 4%, Safari 4.0.3 4%, Chrome 2.0.172.43 2%

---

Or, to express it graphically...

Chart Showing Browser Stats

Firefox overall accounts for 25% - a fairly strong showing. But with IE6 stubbornly stuck at 12%, it will be a while before we can consign it to the dustbin of web history. Opera is languishing in the 15% marked as "Other" along with my browser of choice, Lynx.

The premise is very simple.  There are blocks bouncing around the screen. You have a limited number of shots to remove a set number of them.

Each shot creates an explosion which, if it touches another block, causes that to explode.

This can cause a helpful chain reaction.

One of the many wonderful things about this game is how it pits you against other players.  Rather than posting high scores, it shows you how many other people have reached the level.

Being the massive geek that I am, I've graphed how player levels drop off.  I'm only skilled enough to get to level 89. Must try harder.

What I find fascinating is how steady the player numbers are until each big drop-off. Obviously, at least 50,000 people have downloaded the game, but only 371 players who've made it as far as I have.

Anyway, if you have an Android device, have a play with Prime - it's a great little game.