Now that all the April Fool’s silliness is past us, it’s back to normal AmBlogging! I am a fan of the Performancing Metrics package and am glad that Dave Reid has been successful in producing a plugin for WordPress bloggers

I joined the plugin’s mailing list and was invited to be a beta tester for the newest version to be released tomorrow. So I’m not sure if this qualifies as a scoop! Users of 0.2 can look forward to quite a few new features in 0.3. Let me review them!

• Bloggers can choose to not track visits by users over a specified user level
• The javascript code is now valid HTML/XHTML
• As with most WordPress 2.0 plugins, the plugin can let you know when a new version is available
• You can enable a PMetrics module to be used with the Wordpress widgets plugin
• For non widget users (like me), you can manually insert the sidebar code into your template with some limited customization. (I’ve done this on my sidebar here!)
• You can also make the sidebar module private, so that only you can see it when you visit the site.

This is a big improvement for people who don’t mind showing their statistics. Personally, I tend to be more reserved than transparent. I may turn off the sidebar to the public in the future, but for now I’ll let it show my paltry visit statistics.

I also want to commend Dave for his quick response. Being beta means exactly that! When I tried out the plugin, there was a debug feature that wasn’t turned off and all the plugin’s internal information, including my Performancing username and password were revealed for all to see! I quickly disabled the plugin and notified Dave. I also took the precaution to change my Performancing password. Dave was very quick to respond and fixed the critical issue. All’s well for now. I won’t link to the new version as yet, to let Dave perform the official launch. You should look forward to it too!