Stats Wars
There are some really cool free-or-almost-free web stats tools emerging at the moment: Measure Map, Mint, and Google Analytics, and probably some others I don’t know about yet.
I used to use ShortStats, which was the free forerunner of Mint (I don’t think Shaun Inman supports ShortStats anymore). About a year ago I moved on to PHP i-stats, which is a little flawed, but easily fixed if you know some PHP. It’s not well known, but produces simple and clear graphs that make sense to non-technical users, so I’ve been installing it on most of my client’s sites over the last year, and they seem to like it. It gives a richer analysis than Mint/ShortStats and presents the stats in a rather less intimidating layout.
I got a glimpse of Measure Map during Jeff Veen’s presentation at Web Essentials 05, and signed up for an alpha account straight away. I’ve been an alpha tester for a few days now and I must say I’m deeply impressed thus far. It focusses on the important data and manages to make it look pretty damn sexy ��� if sexy stats isn’t some sort of oxymoron. I’d still like more detail, but I suspect that will be there in upcoming releases. After all, it’s only an alpha release! At the moment it’s very much targetted towards bloggers.
I’ve also signed up for Google Analytics, so I’ll post a review as soon as I’ve tried it out.
November 28th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
I don’t think I’ve seen Pakistan on any of my sitemeter stats, or England for that matter, but why is Alaska highlighted but not Hawaii, or does that get treated as a separate country? (And is that Iceland next to Greenland? I thought it was a little more to the middle.)
And while I’m here, sorry about not adding you to the ‘blogs straight away; while that’s been rectified, don’t feel it’s any reflection on your status that you’re at the end of the antipodean list: I keep it alphabetical after the geographical division.
November 28th, 2005 at 4:13 pm
Yes, I must admit the map is not quite “anatomically correct”, but it does have neat rollovers and a zoom function that help alleviate any confusion as to where folks live.
And thanks for the link… I like the “noises from the shed” tagline.