Over at The UsefulTechnology Blog an article appeared on StatCounter. Besides putting a counter up on a "regular" Website you can also put one up at your Live Space with StatCounter.
To add StatCounter to your Windows Live Space, first register your account at www.StatCounter.com, create a 'project' for your blog, then grab the HTML code for your home page counter by clicking the little spanner icon next to your project. Now click on 'Install Code' and choose a counter style that you like. Hit Next, choose MSN Spaces, then Next again. Now highlight and copy (CTRL+C) the HTML code that's been generated for you.
Now, here's the less well understood part. Go to Windows Live Gallery and install the HTML Sandbox gadget for Windows Live Spaces. Once this gadget is installed on your Spaces homepage, paste in the HTML code that you copied from StatCounter, then remember to save your changes. You can move the HTML Sandbox gadget to wherever you like....
This aroused my curiosity so I decided to give it a go myself too. I found it was indeed quite simple to set up. If you have more than one Website or Blog you can just set up another StatCounter project and manage that one from your account as well. How does StatCounter work:
You can have a visible counter, invisible counter, visible counter on homepage only or a button. For the counter you can even chose between a text one or an image, you can customize to your likings. If during the generation of the install code you tell it to add a "View My Stats" link you can show your visitors the stat logs too. The amount of info collected is quite a bit, it really doesn't stop at just counting! It registers page loads, unique visitors, returning visitors and more... Feel free to have a look at my Live Space's stats, you will find the counter at the bottom right. You can sort on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly. As long as you don't exceed 9,000 page loads each day the service stays free (log size 500 page loads), if you do you will be asked to remove the code or to upgrade. Prices start at $9/Month for up to 1,500,000 Page loads/Month.
It's also worth adding a 'blocking cookie' to all the computers that you use to view your Windows Live Spaces pages otherwise your visitor stats will be skewed every time you post to your Space. You can get the blocking cookie from the Installation and Configuration page at StatCounter (click the little spanner icon again).
If you only use one computer or know the IP/IP range of the computers used by you to access your Live Space you can also exclude these in the settings of your StatCounter project. I did this as I always delete cookies on exit of the browser.
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