McGillveray Studios

I just found out about this on my friend in Argentina site ilovecolors. He keeps abreast of a lot of things on the web. Wow, Google is doing it again, and keeping it open source too. Look out Microsoft, open source will win. Google Wave is about to roll the internet in to one big ball. Something that I think will be one giant step forward. They have been working on it for 2 years and have a ways to go yet. They are so excited about it they had to tell us what they are doing in advance. It also being open source  they wanted to let the developers know so they could start playing with things too. This is cool and will be lots of fun and informative.

I have been trying out two new site analytics tools for your web sites. Woopra I have been using for about 2 weeks and Piwik for just a couple of days.

Woopra in beta is free for all right now, but will have a free and paid for versions when they are finished testing. It uses a client side stand alone program to display the analytics in real time, thats right in real time. The graphics are beautiful and fun to navigate through. It will display how many visitors and the pages they are viewing. You can follow the history in the order each visitor viewed what pages and the length of time on each page. This is way cool. A lot of people are saying that it picks up more visitors than Google Analytics. Woopra thinks that this might be that their code is a lot smaller than Google’s. Woopra being beta and updating their client and server often, you do lose data every once in a while. Hey it is free for now and it is fun. I hope they keep the price of the paid version in line, but I do think it will be worth paying for. To intall you download and intall the client on your computer and intall the provided code on each page you want to track.

You have to wait for site approval for Woopra. This can take 2 – 4 weeks as they approve in batches. Be patient it is worth it.

Piwik is an open source development and is meant to replace Google Analytics. It runs on your server so you know that no third parties have access to your data. We all know that Google shares data with third parties. It, running on your server, must be quick to catch visitors. It is widget driven and you can completely customize the dashboard. It is completely API driven so you have outputs from each data block. This allows to do what ever you want to do with the data, such as place a data graph on your web site or blog, though I don’t know how yet. To install download the PHP software from Piwik.org , unzip it and upload it to a new directory on your site. You then setup a new MySLQ database for it to use, navigate in your browser to Piwik and the setup is quick and easy. The provided code is then inserted on each page you want to track.

Neither one of the analytics tools yet let you block yourself from the statics’s gathering. Woopra says it is working on it and I cannot see anything on the Piwik site about it. I block Woopra with Firefox and the No Script plugin, but No Script does not pick up the Piwik script to block it.

Update – I figured out that by changing a default setting in the golbal.ini.php file in the config directory from yesterday to today it will give you todays results. Now I will wait to see if it updates without refreshing the browser. Update – No It is not a feed, you have to refresh the browser.

Update June 11,2008 – A Woordpress plugin has been created by Jules Stuifbergen that blocks the admin. from being counted. Download it here. Open source beat Woopra here.

Better than Google? Yes I think both will be. Woopra because it is in real time and is better at tracking at what visitors are viewing on you site and the length of time on each page. Piwik because it runs on your own server and so is completely private. Piwik is also open source so I think it has many more possibilities in the future. People can write plug ins and who knows what people will come up with next.