One of my favorite readers is Lisa Sabin-Wilson, the owner of eWebscapes design company and author of the blog Just a Girl in the World. When I found out that Lisa was authoring a book on WordPress, I could not wait to see it. I followed her journey through writing the book all the way to press time and I can tell you that she poured her heart and soul into making WordPress for Dummies the most complete reference on WordPress.

Lisa sent me a copy of the book to review (and I’m giving one away at Casual Keystrokes right now). All I can say, is that it doesn’t matter whether you are an experienced WordPress pro or a brand new blogger needing all the basics, this book is worth every penny. There are over 350 pages of how-to’s, screen shots, tips, and real life examples for Wordpress.com, WordPress.org, and WordPress MU.  There is even a foreword by Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress.

Lisa starts the book off by explaining benefits of WordPress - what it can do for you and she then talks about Blogging Basics - from personal blogging to business blogging.

One whole section of the book is dedicated to using the WordPress.com hosted service and how to make the most of its features.

Another section of the book is about self hosted WordPress.org usage starting at the very beginning from buying a domain name to file transfer and installing WordPress. She explains the administration panel and its capabilities and how to establish a blogging routine.

Chapters 9, 10 and 11 are excellent resources for the intermediate to advanced user who want to customize the look of their site using templates, themes, plugins and such.

Do you want to run multiple blogs with multiple authors with a single installation? WordPress MU could be the solution you are looking for. Lisa dedicates another whole section of the book to explaining MU, how to install it, configure it and how to make it your best friend.

My favorite section of the book is the chapter on using WordPress as a Content Management System. More and more I am moving traditional web sites to WordPress for quicker development times and easier updates from the client side. WordPress for Dummies chapter on WordPress as a CMS is a must see resource if you are considering using WordPress for this purpose.

As a bonus, Lisa has included the best free WordPress themes and plugins that she recommends.

I am very impressed with this book as a whole and fully expect my copy will rapidly become dog-eared as it gets daily use!!

You can get a copy of WordPress for Dummies for yourself at Amazon or your local bookstore, but if you act quickly, you can win a free copy of the book at my other site, Casual Keystrokes by simply leaving me a comment over there. Either way, you need this book.

I confess, I am a statistics junkie and I know that many of my readers are too!! We want to know what is going on behind the scenes of our blogs down to the minute. We are nosy. We want to know what are readers are interested in. We want to know where they are coming from. And there is nothing more exhilarating for a stats junkie than to watch a wave of traffic sparked by a Stumble, a great Digg or a link from a high profile site happen REAL TIME! Yes, real time.In my webmaster toolbox, I keep a handful of stats packages - basically, because they all serve a different purpose. I like the big picture traffic information I get from Awstats that comes with my web hosting package. Google Analytics gives me pretty detailed stats, too, and its free.

However, Performancing Metrics (pMetrics) does it all - and it does it all REAL TIME. pMetrics makes it so easy to capture a great amount of information about your site’s visitors quickly and in logical groups.

Let’s take a look at what pMetrics has to offer!

The Dashboard

When you log into your pMetrics dashboard you can quickly get a sense of the traffic, visitor actions, and what is popular at a glance. pMetrics uses tabbed navigation so you can get to different types of data quickly. Data is also presented numerically, using a bar graph, and by percentage increase or decrease from the previous time period. You can grab your data by day, week, month and more through a simple drop down.

Detail Pages

The visitors detail page shows the time, IP address, country, operating system, browser, number of actions the user took, how long they were there, where they came from, and what search term they used for each and every visitor to the site. You can get aggregate information by country, city, language, browser, operating system and screen resolution as well.

Action information is available by page views, searches, incoming links, outbound links and downloads. You can get detailed information at every turn.

Get content details displayed in multiple formats. If you prefer to see aggregate data as a bar graph, its available. Prefer a cloud display? You can get that, too. You can even export data to Excel for more analysis.

Using the pMetrics Spy tab, you can watch visitors interact with your site as it happens.

Stay informed without logging in! You can subscribe to feeds of your traffic summary, visitors, searches, and incoming links.

Save yourself a step. You can even monitor your feed statistics, subscribers, item views and click throughs directly from your pMetrics dashboard.

Get the most information on your visitors! Another cool feature is that readers who have left comments on your blog no longer show up as IP addresses, they show up as the name they use when leaving a comment.

Conclusion

pMetrics has it all. You can get more information on your site traffic, visitors and source from pMetrics than you can from any other stats package. The pMetrics developers have managed to deliver all of that information in a logical, easy to read, and meaningful way.

pMetrics is a must have for bloggers, but even more so if you manage more than one blog. You can access all of your sites from one main page. With the basic free version of pMetrics you can monitor up to 3 sites at once. If you are like me and manage more, I recommend upgrading to the Pro version for $2.99 per month. With Pro you can monitor up to 10 sites at a time and you get access to all of the pMetrics features. When you register, you get 21 days of Pro for FREE anyhow, so give it a whirl!

If you use pMetrics or decide to try it, let me know what you think!

Did I ever mention that I am married to Mr. Technology? Well, I am. He just can’t help himself. If there is a new gadget, tool, or tech toy out there, Mr. T. will have to pick it up, play with it, test it, or more often than not, buy it.

After experiencing one too many blue screens of death in the early days of our home offices, Mr. T. has become enamored with external data storage. From a bottomless supply of floppy disks back in the 90’s to stacks of writable CDs, Zip drives, flash drives, and external hard drives, we have tried them all. I’m not kidding.

Anyhow, Mr. T. was at his favorite haunt the other day and decided that my life could be made easier with a new technology tool or two. He picked up a SmartDisk USB FireLite drive for me. Why? Because. Because the FireLite drive is so cool. It can hold 160GB of data - which is more than the hard drive in my 3 year old Dell desktop PC. And get this! The entire unit is slightly larger than a deck of cards, which means it will fit in my laptop bag or even in my purse if I need it to.

It is also plug and play! It requires no additional power source (but can handle an AC power supply if needed) and even though it came with software, I haven’t had to install it.

No more excuses when it comes to backing up your data. It just doesn’t get any easier than this!