Fun Short Stats
2005-04-15 10:53 - Web
Web statistics are a strange little niche. There's a bevy of programs to dissect and analyze all sorts of information about viewers and visits and referrals and almost more than one could shake a stick at. And, amazingly, almost every package does it in a completely different way.
For me, I like to keep an eye on how visitors are getting to my site. If I can figure out how to get more people who will find my site useful or entertaining to my site, it makes me happy. But how do I do that? Well for one, I figure out how people are getting here already, and try to use that information to find similar ways to grab other people's attention. The program I've just found seems to do that quite well.
It's called Shortstat and it's designed to provide, in a short amount of space, a lot of the information that I happen to find important about my web site's statistics. When it works, I find it to be quite useful. To be honest, though, I had to tweak it a bit to make it work, and a bit more to make it look right to me.
I thought some time ago about building my own system, but being a busy guy it's been all theoretical until now. Finding this program gave me the so-simple revelation that I can do it all straight in PHP, which is certainly attractive. I'll probably take some ideas that I've discovered anew in Shortstat, some things I've seen from other programs, and start making my own soon. So many ideas, so little time!
