There’s a free counter that I prefer using on all my sites, Sitemeter. I found several instructions for adding the counter to a weblog. Some have examples of the standard html converted to PHP and you can simply drop the code in your sidebar, or main template.

SiteMeter has very good detailed instructions for adding the counter to your weblog.

Login to your sitemeter account. Click on the WebLog option from the top menu bar, scroll down to the paragraph entitled WordPress.com counter instructions and follow their steps. This option doesn’t use the java components that allow you to see where people have come from when they’ve visited your site.

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Others, such as Dr.Mike’s Sitemeter plugin, have little in the way of instructions for adding the plugin. So here’s some info I posted on his site on that one.

Uploading the plugin and getting it to show up in your plugin directory is a little tricky. You may have one of two issues.

When you upload the file it becomes corrupted and WP can’t read the file. So it will never show up in your available plugins directory.

When you uploaded the file, it is not set with the right permissions and cannot be read.

I guess you could have both problems at the same time too. There’s an easy way to figure out what’s happening. I’m writing this for people who have no technical background, so for those of you who do, just skip the obvious instructions.

1. Go to the /wp-admin console. Click the menu item titled “Manage”, then click “Files”. The panel will open to the last file you edited.
2. Scroll down and you’ll see a section that says “Other Files”. Type in /wp-content/plugins/sitemeter.php and press Edit File.
1. If you see a lot of weird characters, your file is corrupted.
3. Scroll down and look under the square; if it says something like “if this file were writable you could edit it”;
1. Then you need to go back to your FTP software and change permissions on the file.
4. When the file is writable, just open Notepad (or similar editor),
1. Open sitemeter.php.txt on your local pc;
2. Copy the entire text and paste it into the file window.
3. Then press update.
5. Now go to your plugins panel and you should now see the sitemeter widget.

You still have to add it to your sidebar. So check your plugins and make sure you have the ‘Sidebar Widget’ activated. Keep in mind that if the theme you’re running for your blog doesn’t support this widget, you’re out of luck. And you’ll have to add the commands to the sidebar.php file yourself.

The theme I was running did support this widget. You can go to the Presentation panel, select the sidebar widget and drag and drop the sitemeter box to your side bar. Unfortunately every time I did this, the entire side bar would vanish.

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Off to do more research! And I found a better plugin.

SiteMeter by David Smith

If you are using WordPress for your blog, here is a WordPress plugin to automatically add the Site Meter tracking code to all your blog’s pages . It works with WordPress 1.5 and 2.0.

To use it:

1. Download the plugin.
2. Unzip it and put the “SiteMeter.php” file into your plugins directory.
3. Go to the WordPress “plugins” page and click on “Activate” to turn the plugin on.
4. Go to the “Options” page and click on the “Site Meter” tab.
5. Enter the codename of your Site Meter account.
6. Press the “Update Options” button.
7. Login to your SiteMeter account, chose Meter Style from the side bar. Select your style and save.
8. That’s all there is to it. The counter will appear on the bottom right side of your home page.