from my limited experience, I’ve used Counterize Plugin, and then WP-Shortstat, for counting. For preventing hot-linking I’ve read you can do that with your .htaccess file but I don’t know how yet.
Hotlink protection can be done in a few ways. This works for a directory of mine:
Options +FollowSymlinks
Options +SymlinksIfOwnerMatch
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://tamba2.org.uk/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.tamba2.org.uk/.*$ [NC]
ReWriteRule .*.(png|gif|jpg)$ - [N,F,L]
Save as .htaccess into the actual image directory after making my domain into your domain (so remove the tamba2 bit)
i’m using http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/
which is really cool. It graphs yur google analytics and feedburner numbers in your admin panel. Both of which, are services that you SHOULD be using instead of good old counters.
