Luthiery Laboratories

• I finally have the page counters working the way I want. You can see a glimpse of it if you click on Dashboard. The numbers are down significantly from when I first added 'dumb' counters, as only about 25% of the traffic on the internet is actually people, the rest is machines talking to each other. I'm also recording the overall total over time. When I have enough data, I'll see about graphing it. Right now I have two days.
  
  
• The back end administration 'Dashboard' is looking really nice, I posted some screen shots. There is lots of useful integration between the front and back ends when an admin is logged in. It is often much faster to find a page you want to edit in the front end than in the back end.
  
  
• I can view and clear the PHP error log from the Dashboard, and automatically show the last few errors. This is good for finding minor bugs. Major errors that take the entire site down obviously render this useless.
  
  
• I re-purposed WordPress' Comments functionality to make a nice Guest Book. This was surprisingly easy, about a dozen lines of code. That's the nice thing about using WordPress - there is so much functionality already there, you just have to figure out how to use it.
  
  
• A lot of things that I had hard-coded are now options in the Dashboard, like lists of search engines and other bots that I don't want to count.

Amazingly, my Gargle watchdog showed that their spider was on my new Guest Book page even before I finished it! For the world's easiest Guest Book, I think I deserve another Brilliant!