Since I don't get any website stats from my otherwise very cool hosts, I'd like to throw up one of those counters like everyone and his brother put up on their websites in the early days of the "personal homepage" explosion. After a couple of Google searches, it's obvious to me that there are way too many of these free services for me to evaluate so I'm turning to you all for a recommendation.
The only one that jumped out at me was OneStat's and only because it occurred to me that I might be able to have a tiny bit of influence on their web browser market share statistics (which often get quoted in the media and which I think under-represents Mozilla) since I've probably got a few readers using Gecko-based browsers.
What do you all think? Do any of you use free counter services? Is there a better solution? (I don't pay for hosting with mozillaZine so I'm not gonna complain about the service ;-) They've got their hands full keeping the forums up and whatnot.)
Posted by asa at June 18, 2004 05:31 PMi like http://www.statcounter.com--it forces no ads on my site and the counters are more graphically customizable than elsewhere. they only give you individual stats for the latest 100 hits, which, while not a problem for my site, may be a bit spartan for yours.
Posted by: gemma on June 18, 2004 06:42 PMWhy not just write a simple PHP script yourself? You can just log the user agents to a file with PHPs file controls and then write a very simple script to analyze them at the other end.
However, if you want something a bit more feature full, I'm sure OneStat will be good.
Posted by: Martin Alderson on June 18, 2004 06:55 PMextreme tracking has done a pretty good job on a site i work on with a lot of traffic.
the tracking is done behind the scenes by placing a little javascript on the main page. i never had to mess with it and only cared about tracking statistics for the front page, so there may be more features that i've not investigated.
here's a preview of what kind of stats it generates:
http://extremetracking.com/open?login=zephor
It's a couple of years since I used them, but last time I was using a tracker I got it from http://www.extreme-dm.com/tracking/
However, given that you work with and know a whole bunch of techie people, not to mention the hundreds of blog readers, I'm sure there must be someone who could host a counter for you and give you the stats from it. I imagine that would be better than the various general offerings out there...
Posted by: michaell on June 18, 2004 06:56 PMI've always liked NetStat Basic:
http://www.nedstatbasic.net/
Obviously I perfer my own internal logging systems and analysis software... but for a free site, that's my preference. But hey... can't complain about free hosting.
Though with feeds on your site, you will be underrepresented with any HTML based method... since it won't portray your audience as a whole. Only those who visit your homepage. Not those that visit archived parts, or feeds.
Posted by: Robert Accettura on June 18, 2004 07:18 PMI've never acutally used any, but for some reason I've never been able to get to the OneStat site from any computer in my house, it just acts as if the site doesn't exist. The google cache is also very very slow--but on other computers, it works fine, and the google cache loads fast also. Anyone know why that might be?
Posted by: dolphinling on June 18, 2004 08:45 PMI'm using Bravenet:
http://counter39.bravenet.com/index.php?id=377286&usernum=3296521954
I use http://www.reinvigorate.net/system/ partially because it can give you "live" stats (as the hits happen - kinda like a giger counter) and it's an open source project itself...
Posted by: Andrew Wooldridge on June 19, 2004 12:20 AMI just went through this process; I now use extremetracking.com, as do several other MozillaZine-hosted blogs.
Gerv
Posted by: Gerv on June 19, 2004 01:58 AMas Robert Accettura said - any method with a counter scrip on the homepage is going to wildly underestimate actual pageviews.
I think a lot of people, myself included, visit your blog via an rss reader, so do not visit the homepage, or perhaps even any pages if they read the posts in their rss reader.
But maybe some of the free counters let you do multiple pages, which would be a distinct benifit (sorry I dont know of any)
Posted by: Donald on June 19, 2004 02:36 AMI'm in favour of onestat, just for that posible effect on oft-quoted percentages which you mentioned.
Posted by: Sander on June 19, 2004 03:23 AMhttp://www.reinvigorate.net is the best counter service ever.
Posted by: zxr on June 19, 2004 07:51 AMNedstat Basic and OneStat complement each other very well. Nedstat shows only the 100 last hits in detail while OneStat shows any detail any time (just edit the GET arguments). On the other side, OneStat doesn't show the GET arguments of referrers (annoying if you have many referrers from forums) while Nedstat does.
I've also been using eXtreme Tracking sometime in the past and it was not that bad.
OneStat being so often in the press was certainly a factor for choosing and influencing it a little bit. With 95% of Mozilla users, the trend can only go upwards...
Posted by: ricky @ mycroft on June 19, 2004 08:26 AMAnother vote for Reinvigorate. The only downside is that they don't track visitor IPs (they may offer it as a paid service in the future).
Posted by: painc on June 19, 2004 09:28 AMTry BBClone http://bbclone.de/, excellent stuff.
Posted by: Anders on June 19, 2004 02:39 PMYou might want to check out SiteMeter (sitemeter.com). I haven't used them in quite a while, but I was very happy with them.
Posted by: Robert Morris on June 20, 2004 06:42 AMI'm curious which stat counters do a good job of differentiating browsers. It seems to me a lot of them underestimate alternative browsers because they don't do a good job of parsing the browser ID string. It would be great if users would post not just a recommendation, but a recommendation with some description of why the service is good, and one thing to pay particular atention to would the service's ability to correctly identify Mozilla based visitors.
Posted by: Redvine on June 21, 2004 04:30 PMGet it up boy! She will be happy!
Posted by: Cialis on July 7, 2004 11:12 AM