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Recently, I have found myself frequently monitoring apache traffic on the-bob, and I did not like having to go to the main page every time to get to the awstats information. So, I wrote up this quick and dirty bookmarklet. When you click on it, it prompts you for the domain you want to check out, and then takes you to the stats page.

It should be noted that this only works for domains that are publicly available via the guest user account. However, it could be modified to work with other accounts. The reason that it doesn’t work with all accounts, is because certain people, that will remain nameless (such as Rusty) have requested that their stats be private.

In order to save the bookmarklet, standard procedure is to click on the link and drag it to your bookmarks. So, without further ado, I present the bookmarklet:

the-bob awstats

Ok, so I added another “feature” to my site, and this time I decided to actually go through the process of making it a plugin. Generally I just have all my customizations in a separate file that I include. But, I figured I would be nice and share this one with the world.

As you should see above, there is a short excerpt at the top of the page (if you are on the home page). Well, this is what the plugin generates. It works by figuring out the oldest post in your database, and then goes through the years up until now finding all the posts that fall on this day. However, I figured that like me there would be some days that you did not write anything so there is a built in threshold. I have mine set so it finds one from today (give or take a day).

From the collection of posts is pulls from the database, it randomly selects one to display at the top of the page. If none are found in the range nothing is displayed.

If you want to give this plugin a try, download it.

Just rename the file from thisdayinhistory.phps to thisdayinhistory.php and upload it to your plugins directory.