Kevin Schroeder has a quick post to his blog talking about the integration of job queuing he's done with his WordPress blog to build a list of popular posts for his sidebar.

One of the things I liked on my old blog was the ability to have a Popular Posts section that was based off of Google Analytics. [...] So I had missed that, but it was not overly important so I left it. But yesterday was a day where I needed something that was both engaging and brainless to do. So I decided to implement my Job Queue API code for WordPress so that I could write a WordPress widget that would put the popular posts in the sidebar.

He's created a plugin to handle most of the heavy lifting for you.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial from Jason Gilmore showing how you can interface your application with the Google Analytics service through its HTTP API. Jason shows ho to use the Google Analytics API PHP Interface tool to take most of the hard work out of it.

Google Analytics (GA) is the de facto solution for analyzing web site traffic and trends. [...] If you're not regularly relying upon Google Analytics or a similarly capable analytical service, then you're left at a major competitive disadvantage in terms of your ability to effectively understand the interests, demographics, and technical requirements of your audience.

Using the Google Analytics site is a pleasant experience, but having to log in just to check your numbers each day can get tiresome quickly. Jason introduces a way, using the GAPI class to pull things like traffic statistics and account information. More examples of how it can be used are shown on the GAPI website.