Hate the sorting through the hundreds of obvious spam messages Akismet caught just to find that one legitimate comment? Derek Punsalan found a new WordPress plugin which aims to remove the obvious spam comments. I can already see Simple Spam Filter becoming a vital tool in every WordPress user’s anti-spam toolkit.

Do you hate Google Analytics’ interface but don’t have the cash for the superb statistics tracking software Mint? Automattic, WordPress’ parent company, has released the Automattic Stats plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs. The new plugin brings the power of WordPress.com stats to any WordPress blog. While I’ll be sticking with my trusty Mint, I know quite a few bloggers out there who will benefit from this. Learn more about the technical details of Automattic Stats on Andy Skelton’s blog.

I’d like to announce that my Feedburner Pepper for Mint has finally been released. Now Feedburner users will have an excellent alternative to Bird Feeder. You can grab the Feedburner Pepper in the Mint Peppermill.

A big thanks goes out to my beta testing team. You guys were great at finding bugs!

What Makes Up a GPU?

Before I could lower my usage, I had to first understand what a GPU is. Since the GPU, or Grid Performance Unit, is a new form of measurement in hosting, there are a number of misconceptions surrounding the unit. Even my original understanding of a GPU was wrong.

GPUs reflect the amount of processing power a site uses on the Grid. The key point here is processing on the Grid. MySQL queries take place on the SmartPool or GridContainer system and are excluded from GPU measurements. GPUs will contain PHP scripts, Perl scripts, and other CPU related tasks.

Tracking GPU Usage

To find out exactly what was consuming my GPUs, Media Temple provided me with an itemized GPU report. To get a GPU report, just send in a ticket to support. In the future, GPU reports will be available in the Account Center with a click of a button.

Alternatively, Urchin provides a quick glance at the most likely candidates of GPU usage. The report to use is called Page Query Terms and can be found under Pages & Files. While Urchin’s report did not point out the smaller pages using my GPUs, the report accurately diagnosed the biggest GPU hogs on my site.

My GPU Report Results

Once I had my GPU numbers, I was surprised with the results. My site’s feed consumed around 50% of my hourly GPU usage. Why? My feed was uncached and running Mint’s Bird Feeder. Not only did WordPress have to generate my feed on every request, Bird Feeder had to acquire information about the subscriber and store it in a database. Since feed readers tend to request a site’s feed in short intervals, my feed was constantly being accessed.

Additionally, WordPress’ Permalink Redirect plugin appeared to be creating multiple requests per page load. If a person would visit the incorrect permalink URL, Permalink Redirect would not run until after the page had already been pulled from the database. Then, the person would have to fetch the correct page’s contents, wasting even more resources.

Finally, I found search engine spiders were hovering around robots.txt, requesting the file several times per hour. I found that odd since I did not have a robots.txt file on my site. Wouldn’t you know, WordPress automatically generates a robots.txt if the file is missing, wasting resources.

How I Solved the Usage Problems

Addressing my feed issue was simple. I just moved my feed to Feedburner. The Feedburner Plugin insured that all my subscribers would not have to change anything to continue receiving my content. More importantly, the Feedburner Plugin moves the feed without any heavy PHP processing, a factor which could contribute to GPUs.

Fixing my Permalink Redirect issue left me feeling stupid. I knew I needed .htaccess rules instead of using PHP processing, but I didn’t expect the results. In my search for .htaccess rules, I came across this post addressing my issue specifically. In fact, so specifically the site even mentioned my name as a proponent of Permalink Redirect! I guess I need pay more attention the blogosphere; there might be some other worthwhile enhancements out there for me.

Finally, I solved the robots.txt access issue by simply creating a robots.txt file. WordPress stopped creating one for me, and my site served up a static file instead.

How to Lower Your Usage

Obviously, my specific optimization are not going to work for everyone, so here are some simple general optimization you can try on your site:

• Cache your site’s content with WP-Cache.
• Uninstall plugins which are unnecessary.
• Look for cached version of existing plugins.
• Look into enabling persistent MySQL connections in your PHP apps.
• Lower your site’s footprint.

Hopefully by following this advice, you too can lower your GPU usage.

One more thing. For Mint users who are using Feedburner or plan to move their feed to Feedburner, I am developing a Feedburner Pepper which will rival Bird Feeder. My Pepper has caching and offers the same functionality as Bird Feeder. Look for a release in the upcoming week, or download the beta now.

Update: There was a bug in GPU reporting. Media Temple is currently working out the issue. You can read more about it at one digital life.

On a side note, if you use a feed reader to stay up to date with my site, make sure you’re using the correct URL. I’m dropping FeedBurner in favor of Mint’s new Bird Feeder, so if you’re using my old FeedBurner URL change it to my site’s feed URL. I’ve been redirecting my site feed for some time, so most of you should be alright.

Finally, with that said, if you’re looking for my BirdFeeder plugin for WordPress, look at this plugin instead. He beat me to release, and his is technically implemented better than mine was. I’m sending him some changes which should make his work better with all WordPress and Mint installations. I’ll post a comment when that’s done.

Finally, the true Mint 2.0 compatible Trends has been released. I’ve spent the last week or so looking over what the new Mint 2.0 API can do, and utilized what made sense in Trends. Inside Trends 3.0 you’ll find Mint 2.0′s new on-the-fly time interval switching on every tab. This will hopefully make it easier to get the specific data you’re after. I’ve noticed this has come particularly handy on the New / Old tabs. By being able to change the time on the fly, you can find those pages which have recently been created but just aren’t popular enough to make the Popular tab.

Besides the new time changing ability, Trends has a few more tricks up its sleeve. It now supports hourly page history (a previous limitation). This will help when you’re taking advantage of the time changing ability. Also, the page history will stop displaying rows when the rest will be zero (a problem when comparing by weeks and having a limited database size). Finally, a number of nasty bugs have been squashed that have somehow slipped past Brett and myself through the versions we’ve released. Most notably the time on the New and Old tabs was horribly off.

I hope you enjoy this new version. If you have any more suggestions about what you’d like to see in Trends, keep them coming. You can download Trends 3.0 in Mint’s Peppermill, the only place it will be available from here on out.

Speaking of new features, if you have any ideas for what should be in Trends 3.0, leave them over at the Mint forums. Brett and I will be taking your suggestions, hopefully bringing you the best release of Trends to date. Enjoy the new Mint 2.0 compatible Trends and keep those suggestions coming!

Finally, keep a lookout for a WordPress plugin which will handle all the Bird Feeder stuff for you. I might just have one up my sleeve.

Update: Both Peppers will work in Mint 2.0. However, expect at least an upgrade on Trends to take advantage of the new API.

Notification is a pane-less Mint pepper that sends the site owner an email when a specified criteria is met. The user can select between total or unique visits for either the hour, day, week, month, or overall time period. This could be used to find out when your site reaches a specific milestone, or to find out when previous months hits have been passed.

I’d highly recommend checking this out. Also, be sure to setup a Rich Text email notification. Tony has spent some time formatting the email, and trust me, it’s very Mint-like. Enjoy.

Due to this core change, there are now several files in the Blog Comments’ folder which are no longer used. If you’re upgrading from an older version, it’s safe to delete rss_cache.inc, rss_fetch.inc, rss_parse.inc, rss_utils.inc, and the extlib folder. That will free up some space on your server and keep your directories nice and tidy.

To upgrade to the latest version of Blog Comments, or just find out what Blog Comments is, head over to the Blog Comments page on my site. There you’ll find a description of Blog Comments, the full changelog for 1.1, and a download link for the latest version.

Now regarding my practical joke, what did you guys think of it? Did I get you? I know a few people who I talked to said they caught onto it when I just came up with the press release, but once I posted a download link, they didn’t know what to believe.

Now regarding the download, yes I do have a Pepper for download that will actually load up in Mint. I know only a few people downloaded it, and I can’t blame you if you didn’t. When someone posts a random download on April Fool’s Day, you don’t know what to expect. So, if you haven’t downloaded it yet, do that now. Or, just look at the screenshot below.

I don’t know about you, but I think I may be on to something. I can see the Pwn-a-nator being the next big thing. Now, I’d like to take this time and thank the people who were involved in this practical joke and didn’t even know it. Thanks to Paul Stamatiou, Shaun Inman, Michael Heilemann, and Tony Gumbel. There’s a reason why you guys made the list, and that’s because you’re all awesome people.

Well, I guess that concludes April Fool’s Day. Now it’s time to go back to being serious.

Here is the raw visits data:

Here is the famous Digg effect, still not complete, powered by the Fresh View Pepper:

What Mint stats post would go complete without showing of the wonderful Pepper Trends, which was created by myself and Brett DeWoody. Just check out the increase percentage on the Digg article:

• Now two panes; the Internal Pane and the External Pane.
• Added watched pages, referrers, and searches tracking.
• Referrers abide by the ignored domains set in Mint’s preferences.
• New Quick View tab allowing you to see how visitors are getting to your site.
• Mini graph added to the History Dropdown.
• Pages with no hits in the secondary internal, but existed prior to the secondary internal will now display “No Hits” instead of “New!”.
• Minor bug fixes.

You can get the latest version, as always, from the Trends page. Just note, if you have Trends 1.x installed you’ll need to uninstall it prior to upgrading. If you don’t we’ll give you a friendly reminder, so don’t worry about breaking anything if you forget. Enjoy!

You may notice that tracking of watched pages is not included in this update. We had originally intended to add this feature, but unfortunately there is no way to hook into the watched pages. We have put in a request for some hooks for watched pages to be added to Mint, and if this request ever becomes a reality we will be adding it to Trends.

Our next update of Trends is going to be pretty substantial, so if you’ve been wanting something added or think something can be done better, feel free to let us know. We’re always listening to your ideas and comments, so keep them coming.

If you’re unfamiliar what Trends is, it’s a Pepper for Mint which displayed the current trends of your site. It will keep track of popular pages, best performers, worst performers, new pages, and old pages. The time ranges are user configurable, so Trends will work perfectly whether you have a high traffic site or not.

I can’t say when we’re going to release it because that’s up to Brett, but we’re getting pretty close. Keep an eye out for the Performance Pepper in the coming days.