What is Wrong with WordPress Statistics?

Ever since I've upgraded this blog, I've had no stats. I've uninstalled, deleted and reinstalled a double handful of plugins to no effect: all I get is a big bunch of zeroes. I installed Google Analytics, which is good as far as it gets, but it delivers offsite and it means just one more thing to waste time logging into. WordPress.com Stats was equally useless. Then I trawled the forums, and found that in early 2009, there was a stats meltdown at wordpress: no one was getting any statistics, either in wordpress.com or wordpress.org. After many irate posts by people who wanted their statistics, wordpress.com was fixed, and my defunct blog at livelikeaflame.wordpress.com is steadily measuring its negligible hits. However the scenario for owner-managed blogs like this one is much bleaker: nothing seems to have been done.

WordPress exists in two forms. There's the onsite form which lives at wordpress.com and functions like blogger, which is administered by wordpress staff. And there's the php zip verison that you can unpack in a site you own and run yourself. This latter is called wordpress-org, though of course it lives wherever people give it a home. This blog is one of the latter category. I used to use Cystats, which worked fine until I upgraded wordpress to version 3.x.x. Now I have no idea who visits my blog, how they get here, and what they do while they're here. I don't know whether my hits are up or down, or which posts people like the most. And it looks like this situation will continue indefinitely.

In other news my much vaunted Linux machine has died on me and now will not boot to POST. I have changed the SMPS to no avail. Now I have to check the RAM. If it isn't the RAM, I may be looking to have to change the motherboard or the processor or both. And this machine is less than two years old.