Improvements Continue

I have been on a blog, back-end fix-it-up improvement kick lately and the trend continues. Today, I implemented a needed amelioration to my statistics package, ShortStat by Shaun Inman. If you are familiar with this wonderfully-simple PHP script to track visitor information, page hits, user agents, and more, then I think this picture will speak more than my words:

For those unfamiliar with ShortStat, I have added an SVG graph that depicts total hits and unique visitors over the last two weeks. I plan to add a pie graph for the browsers and platforms (minus crawlers and search engines for both) in a few days when I am not extremely busy. Also, I think some of the SQL calls in Inman’s script could be optimized and aggregated (i.e. use GROUP BY to minimize the number of calls instead of making multiple calls within a PHP for loop).

Technically, I should be tackling other projects, work, homework, and other sundry tasks on my to-do list, but I enjoy adding such features to my blog. I need to upgrade to WordPress v1.5 Strayhorn, so look for that announcement in the next few weeks.