Yesterday we saw my important plugins but today I will take a look at plugins that make it easier to access a wide array of information about my blog in order to track certain patterns and statistics.

Information Plugins

WordPress Reports – This plugin is the equivalent of crack. It adds a new tab in my admin panel called reports and displays Google Analytics data for the last 7 days in nifty bar graph form. Stats include Weekly/Daily visitors and page views, average page views per visit, top inbound links, rising inbound links, popular blog entries, rising blog entries, falling blog entries, top entry pages, percent of new versus returning visitors, and circulation via Feedburner statistics. Be careful with this one as checking my stats is a new obsessive habit of mine. Screenshot »

Adsense Earnings Report – Yup, I have ads on my blog in case you haven’t noticed, but just for individual postings. I don’t expect to earn much money from them but I do like to keep track of my earnings and now I can do it from right inside the WordPress interface. It only shows impressions, clicks, and earnings but what else is there? I have noticed the numbers are a little off compared to actually logging in to the AdSense console but it still gives me a reasonable idea. Screenshot »

Diagnosis – I like to know some of the geeky backbone information about the server running my blog and this plugin makes it real easy to dig ALL of that info up. It mostly tells me what version of PHP/MySQL is installed, the name of the server, what PHP extensions are loaded, and the database load. I mostly use it for the last item to make sure my database is chugging along swimmingly. Screenshot »

WordPress.com Stats – These give pretty much the same information as the Google Analytics reports mentioned above. I just use the WordPress stats for comparison reasons. Two perspectives are always better than one. Screenshot »

TD Wordcount – When you blog pretty much everyday it is amazing to look back and see how many words you have written over the life of your blog. TD Wordcount breaks it all down in a multitude of ways including total for published entries, total for unpublished entries, entry with most words, average words per post, percentage of posts with 300+ words per entry, how many words per author, and number of posts per author. I always get a kick out of these kinds of stats and as of this post I have written 24,820 words! Screenshot »

WP Plugins Tracker – With all of the plugins I needed a way to make sure I was up to date with the latest releases. Plugin tracker does just that by checking your installed plugin version with the current version in the WordPress Plugin Database. Screenshot »

Tomorrow I will take a look at article tool plugins that make my life easier when I am writing.