I checked into my site this morning to find that the WordPress.com stats plugin I was using wasn’t working. I received this message instead of the pretty graphs:
Your WordPress.com account,
404techsupportis not authorized to view the stats of this blog. Currently access to stats is broken for some users and we are working on fixing this. Your stats are still being counted and will be visible once we restore access for your account.
Searching around, apparently I wasn’t the only one. Unofficial news reports tie the WordPress.com Stats downtime to DDoS attacks that WordPress.com has been suffering through. The solution, however, would seem to contradict that. The latest recommendation is to disable the WordPress.com Stats plugin and install a WordPress plugin called Jetpack by WordPress.com. It includes a lot of other features in addition to stats tracking that works. It will also keep all of your previous stats data and bring it over nicely into Jetpack, which you would lose if you went to another Analytics plugin.
Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.
For more information, check out Jetpack.me.
Features include:
- Simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server. Previously provided by WordPress.com Stats.
- The WP.me URL shortener.
- Hovercard popups for your commenters via Gravatar.
- Easily embedded media from popular sites like YouTube, Digg, and Vimeo.
- For the Math geeks, a simple way to include beautiful mathematical expressions on your site.
- A widget for displaying recent tweets. Previously provided byWickett Twitter Widget
- Your readers can easily share your posts via email or their favorite social networks. Previously provided by the SharedaddyWordPress plugin.
- Your writing will improve thanks to After the Deadline, an artificial intelligence based spell, style, and grammar checker. Previously provided by the After the Deadline WordPress plugin.
- and many more to come!
I deactivated the WordPress.com Stats plugin and installed Jetpack without a hitch. It also disabled the After the Deadline plugin for my site since it’s also included in Jetpack. When I tried to connect Jetpack, I received this error message:
Your Jetpack has a glitch. Something went wrong that’s never supposed to happen. Guess you’re just lucky:
xml_rpc-32601
Try connecting again.
This might reinforce the suspicion that it was a DDoS attack that took down the original Stats connection but the actual solution is to temporarily disable caching with the W3TC Caching Plugin. With caching off, you can connect Jetpack to WordPress.com by signing in with your WordPress.com account and then re-enable W3TC caching.
Jetpack includes other Automattic plugins that are going to take some looking into. LaTeX will be great for including math equations and I was previously using After the Deadline for spellcheck and grammar proofing. It’s kind of nice when errors result in trading up.
The Jetpack Stats have a little different look to them but they seem to show up a little faster.
Stats
Check out the Jetpack plugin for your self-hosted WordPress site.