I have been using a plugin for Movabletype called Visitor Stats for several weeks now since shortly after MT4 was released and I knew when I set it up that it had lot's of potential. At that point in time it didn't show me as much information as Sitemeter or Google Analytics but that was just a matter of time.

The author of the plugin, Mark from MT-Hacks, has just released a new version of the plugin which gives a lot more options and some cool included widgets as well.

The stats counter widget on my sidebar includes a little mini-graph that mirrors the larger one that I have access to in the main Movabletype UI, and the plugin adds quite a bit of functionality as well. Another widget that is included that you can also see just under my stat counters is a 'most read entries' widget. I've just started having this track but I thought it was pretty cool.

Visitor Stats also gives me information in the MT Dashboard such as keywords, list of recent visitors and views complete with username (if available), IP address, and referring site.

There are also some new template tags, quite a few as a matter of fact if you get the pro version, which I did. I have just put the plugin online so haven't had a chance to play with it much yet, but I should be able to add the graph to my entry sidebar and show visits just for that entry. I'll have to take a look at that tomorrow. I also need to edit the graph background so that the color fits here. That bright white just doesn't do it.

I have had one issue with it but haven't had the opportunity to figure it out yet, and that is when you click on the graph on each particular day (as shown above) it gives you a link below the graph like this one...

When you click on the URL (166 views blah blah) I get an error such as the following...

I am going to keep playing around with it and see if I can figure out what's up before I contact the author. Even with that one glitch I am very impressed with it. The big thing about stuff like Google Analytics and Sitemeter, as well as MyBlogLog is that they are hosted on remote servers and therefore subject to problems like servers that might be down or other weird shit like sun spots. With MT Visitor Stats being hosted on the local server I know I am getting an accurate picture of who was here, and when.

I also haven't been able to figure out the time zone thing yet either. I can't seem to find a setting to change it. My host, Livingdot, is located out west and everything shows up as three hours in the future. Yeah, I know it's only a bit of math but I am anal about that stuff.

Right now I am using four or five of Mark's plugins. He's the dude that wrote the AjaxRating plugin that I had up for a while. I will most likely put that back on here eventually, but I suck at Photoshop and just have not taken the time to create rating images that look decent here. The default ones are nice but only on a white background. They looked like hell here which is why I pulled it.

I also used his Ajax Comments plugin for a short while, but since I went to background publishing last month it renders the plugin useless. I keep hoping that he will release an update to Ajax Comments that will allow me to have a comment box right from the main home page and even offered to purchase it if it had that functionality, but I haven't heard back yet. It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to script into my templates but I tried and seriously screwed them up. I need to leave that shit alone and let someone that knows what they are doing fool with it.

In addition to the Visitor Stats plugin, there are several things going on this week with Movabletype that may or may not be of interest to folks. You can read more over at the Movabletype Community blog.