I have just added a couple of new plugins to this blog and tidied up some old cruft that I had been meaning to get around to for a while. One of the plugins I have added is a really rather good statistcs tool called Counterize II. It provides a very quick (and impressively comprehensive) set of stats about page hits, browser types, referring URLs etc. all readily accessible from the wordpress admin dashboard – so no need to trawl through web logs to find out where your visitors are coming from or which is your most popular post or page. Thoroughly recommended.
In the process of searching for such a plugin I also came across Angie Bowen’s posting about the top ten things she always does when setting up a new blog. Whilst I don’t agree with all her recommendations (identifying the ones I disagree with is left as an exercise for the class) I think this is a very handy aide-memoire. Her pointers about blog security and discussion settings in particular are sensible and worth reading.