Stats in your time zone

When we sat down at an Austin cafe in 2005 and wrote the stats system, Matt and I had no idea what we were getting into. He created the databases and drew the little smiley face while I wrote the code. We had milk and cookies. It was really cute. We were naïve!

I swear it was Matt’s idea to store stats data as daily summaries in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), which is why stats days have always ended at odd hours for non-Greenwichians. But even if I seem blameless, I failed to champion your cause soon enough. It is even more my fault than Matt’s.

And so today I present a gift. If you have set your blog’s time zone, your stats reports will honor that setting (in whole hours from -12 to +14). This upgrade is retroactive to the beginning of 2009. It affects all blogs using WordPress.com stats, even self-hosted blogs using the Stats plugin (version 1.4).

The best part is that any time you change your blog’s time zone, the stats reports change retroactively. This works because now we store data by the hour instead of by the day. I’ve written lots of new code and Barry is bringing many new systems online to cope with the additional data, and we do it all just to give you stats in your time zone. We really do like you.