I noticed the WordPress Stats stopped working on my blog about a week ago, and then I realized I wasn’t the only one. If’ you’ve logged in and seen the following message, you’re not alone:

Your WordPress.com account, (xxxx) is not authorized to view the stats of this blog. Currently access to stats is broken for some users and we are working on fixing this. Your stats are still being counted and will be visible once we restore access for your account.

There seems to be some contradictory theories out there as to exactly why this is happening, but last I saw WP.org was mum on the whole thing. Fortunately, there’s a super easy fix here and it leaves you with a better situation than before.

1. Deactivate the WP Stats plugin (it’s crucial you do this first)
2. Install the Jetpack plugin
3. Activate the Jetpack plugin

And that’s it; you don’t lose any of your old stats in this process too so there aren’t any worries there. And the best thing is Jetpack has a lot of really cool extras beside the stat interface, which already gives you a bit more detail than WP Stats anyway. There are options for Twitter feeds, social sharing, wp.me link sharing, a post proofreader, and so forth. It takes a lot of what I like about several plugins and combines them.

Jetpack is made by WordPress, by the way, so it’s as trustworthy as any plugin you could download. One of the aforementioned theories out there is that WP Stats is going to be replaced by Jetpack as its features are being folded into a plugin that houses a broader array of WordPress functions. So to be safe, I didn’t delete the WP Stats plugin; I just left it inactive.

Spread the word. It’s an easy fix to a problem whose solution was surprisingly hard to find on Google, which is why I’m putting this down in a post.

I’m a longtime WordPress user in my blogging, but I finally found a little time to mess around with one of Brian Gardner Media’s Revolution themes.

Holy. Cow.

I used the Metro theme to redesign my professional site and integrate it with a professional blog for a more seamless look. What you see as of today took about three hours to set up. I could’ve designed this all by code and it would’ve taken a week for me (I can do it, but I’m not fast with PHP). Obviously I have more of the deep links to fix, but I pretty much configured the front page and got it to look how I wanted in a few hours. Read more