jetpack Archives - Complete, Concrete, Concise

WordPress – Preliminary Impressions of Photon in JetPack

richardsplanet — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:32:09 +0000

JetPack for WordPress now includes a feature called Photon:

Photon works by using wordpress.com to cache and serve up images from your site.

Since I am always looking for ways to reduce my bandwidth (and speed up performance), I enabled it.

I have observed a reduction in the bandwidth:

The 20^th, 21^st, and 22^nd averaged about 3% fewer page hits than on the 25^th – but it is obvious that (with Photon enabled) I used less bandwidth on the 25^th .

The 23^rd and 24^th are the weekend, so there is always a drop in traffic. I suspect the spike seen on the 24^th is related to enabling Photon.

Based on very limited data, Photon appears to be working well and is saving me some bandwidth. It does not require me to change anything about my site (always a serious bonus).

One thing I don’t understand is why there are suddenly more clicks on my images:

As the screen capture shows, in approximately two days, there have been 204 clicks on cached images (the cached images have the URLs i0.wp.com, i1.wp.com, i2.wp.com), whereas, the other 5 days there were only 13 clicks on images on my site.

Updated 27-March-2013 @ 14:49

One problem I have noticed while using Photon is that when I update an image on an article (i.e. replace it), the change is not reflected in the cached version.

I tried disabling Photon and then re-enabling it, but it didn’t pick up the changes.

I will have to see if the changes get picked up at a later time – at the time of this update, it has been about 3 hours.

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WordPress – Jetpack 1.2 Broken on IE 8 and IE 9

richardsplanet — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:49:00 +0000

I just updated to Jetpack 1.2 on my site and find that the Site Stats module is broken for Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9. It works fine with FireFox 7.0.1.

Here’s Site Stats as seen in IE 8 (click for larger image):

Problems are:

it looks ugly, nice tables and formatting are all missing
the bar graph at the top doesn’t display
the Yesterday tabs do not work – clicking them does nothing
while the weekly tab does work, again the formatting is ugly and broken
IE 8 reports Errors on Page

It renders and functions fine in FireFox. The formatting is nice, the graphs show up, and the Yesterday tabs work. This is Site Stats as seen in FF (click for larger image):

If you use IE 8 as your primary browser (since my main computer still runs Windows XP) or IE 9, I cannot recommend upgrading to Jetpack 1.2.

All problems (that I saw) with Site Stats appear to be fixed as of 22-December-2011.

Update: Version 1.2.1 was released later today. Site Stats is still broken in IE 8 and IE 9.

Update (19-Nov-2011), applies to 1.2.1: I’m noticing that while the formating of Site Stats definitely looks fine in FireFox 7.0.1, the bar chart (reddish zone) doesn’t display when clicking on Site Stats on the from the left hand column (marked in red). I don’t remember this problem with with 1.2, so something may have broken with the update from 1.2 to 1.2.1. The bar charts do come up when clicking on the Days, Weeks, or Months tabs (marked in green): (click for a larger image)

Update (22-November-2011): Site Stats is now displaying correctly. Since I haven’t installed any updates, my best guess is that the Site Stats page was not being generated locally but by on the WordPress server and they have fixed their problems. As well, the bar graph comes up correctly in FireFox 7.0.1.

Update (25-November-2011): Site Stats is not working – again. This time, the values it is showing me are incorrect. Most of the stat values are too small (about 1/7^th of the expected value) – although, some are too big. As well, the Summary Tables show stats going back to December-2009 – this is impossible, this site only got powered by WordPress in March-2011. sigh. I hope they get this fixed.

The At A Glance bar chart displays the correct values (for now).

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Jetpack Site Stats can be Misleading

richardsplanet — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 07:24:02 +0000

I have the Jetpack plugin installed and use the Stats module in it to monitor activity on this site.

It gives the following notice:

Keep in mind we don’t count your own visits.

Unfortunately, this is not completely true – if you are not logged in, it will count your visits to your site.

To avoid counting your own visits to your site, you (1) must be logged into the administrator panel before browsing your own site, (2) must have Jetpack set to ignore logged in visitors (of course, this means it will not track any other logged in visitors too):

1) Click on Site Stats from the Jetpack menu. Then click on Configure on the WordPress.com stats module:

2) Ensure the Count the page views of registered users who are logged in. is NOT checked:

This is rather disappointing – I imagined they would be using a cookie to track my visits and, thus, ignore them. At least it explains the sudden “surges” I sometimes saw – it wasn’t other visitors, it was me.

Thanks to commenter Brad for informing me about the tracking option in the Site Stats configuration.

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