WordPress.com Adds a Stats Widget in the Admin Bar

WordPress is making a couple of small announcements related to its stats feature. For one, it's adding a small stats chart to the admin bar for WordPress.com blogs. Second, it's now enabling private blogs to get meaningful traffic data, which wasn't possible before.

"The WordPress.com Admin Bar (visible at the top of your screen if you are logged into WordPress.com) now shows a tiny stats chart called a sparkline. You will only see the sparkline on your own blogs," Automattic's Andy Skelton explained.

The small stats feature shows up on any WordPress.com blog you own. It lists the page view count for the past 48 hours on that blog. Night time, in the region where your blog is set to, is shown with darker bars. There are 48 bars, one for each hour.

Of course, the sparkline provides only a quick overview, if you want to know how you're blog is doing at a glance. If you want any meaningful, detailed data, just click on the sparkline and you'll get to the stats section of your blog's dashboard.

The feature has been available to anyone hosting a WordPress blog, but WordPress.com users only get it now.

WordPress.com is also changing the way private blogs track user stats, any visit, from any contributor or user, will now be counted.

Normally, for public blogs, visits from the owner or users with editing and publishing rights aren't added, since most people want to know how many visitors they have, not how many times they've visited the blog.

"Traditionally we have omitted the views attributed to a blog’s own users because stats were meant to reflect the activity of the general public," Skelton explains.

"However, this meant that private blogs had no useful stats reports. This change will be especially useful for private blogs that have many users," he added.