One of the more nagging issues I have with releasing my code into the wild is that once it’s gone I have no idea what it’s being used for. I do have some limited data from various sources; for example I can easily track downloads from my site and the various counters some of the 3rd party sites who distribute my code have but this is painful and, frankly, flawed.

Since I personally reuse downloaded code multiple times, while only downloading it once, I’m assuming there are other people who work the same way. This makes download tracking inaccurate for usage stats. Even if that wasn’t true, I would have to visit a few sites to get a total count and I’m pretty lazy so that kind of sucks…

Taking a cue from desktop programs I’m going to start keeping track of who’s using my shit.

Starting with the next release of Wp-Click-Tracker I’m going to be including a little script that let’s me know when a WordPress plugin is activated and/or deactivated.

For privacy hounds let me say this: the only information I’m going to collect is the URL of the site as well as the name and time of the action. This information will be kept strictly confidential though I will be publishing statistics about my plugin usage in the future. I will never, ever, ever, EVER, collect more data than what’s mentioned above.

To that end, the script I’m going to use is a new WordPress plugin I wrote I’m calling Activation Counter. I’ll be releasing it in the coming weeks for other Wordpress plugin developers but I’ve been using it since the 0.3 release of wp-click-tracker and, so far anyway, it’s worked perfectly. Every time someone activates or deactivates wp-click-tracker a little “ping” is sent to my server which records the data.

Right off the bat, it’s allowing me to collect information about how many people are trying wp-click-tracker, obviously, but also how long someone keeps the plugin active. Because of that I’ve become aware of quite a few issues with the existing code that I’ll be fixing in the next release (0.4). I never would have been able to know about the issues if I hadn’t started monitoring the plugin.