WordPress Permalinks and Blog Stats Problem

Posted by Strangely Internet, Technology Add comments

Feb 092009

Permalinks or Stats Problem?

This may or may not be tied up with an earlier WordPress problem I had, wordpress-27-mysterious-permalinks-problem, but here’s how it manifests itself.

Description

I use a popular WordPress plugin called WordPress.com Stats which does what it says, most of the time – i.e. keeps a history of page views and the like, displaying summary and detailed information as required.

On the main stats screen, is a large chart with two collimated sets of entries below.
Each column has three main bits; a URL link, a count, and a little graph-like icon that is another URL link, this time to the wordpress.com system.
All links on the left work fine.
Those on the right… the graphical link is consistently okay; the URL link for “Top Posts and Pages” is either correctly pointing to a post on my website, or has the same URL as the graph-like icon. !!

Current Status

An old WordPress.org support page, http://wordpress.org/support/topic/132159, mentions this problem and a work-around. The plugin designer, Andy Skelton, also acknowledged it and said it would be fixed. However, on this site, the problem is as I’ve said above. I’ll have to check my other sites to see if it’s the same across all of them, but I wonder how many other people have noticed this effect?

The workaround below needs to be repeated at each WordPress upgrade/install…

Workaround

This comment on the above support posting shows the work-around. Doing this procedure makes the correct URLs show in the browser status bar on mouse hover.

First find your offending post
Second, open the post
Third, save (update) it

Link Fixed!

As I mentioned above, I know for a fact that I’ve revisited some posts for spell-checks etc and then saved them. Some of these posts still appear incorrectly in the Stats. So as this commenter points out, it’s the upgrade doing it and it’s a bit of a pain to do this process after each WordPress upgrade.