WebStats
Latest
Friday Favorite: Woopra
A few months ago I was looking for an alternative to Google Analytics and found Woopra. It's still in beta so don't expect it to replace your current solution, but I'm having a lot fun using it on a few WordPress blogs. Setup is easy, if not a bit time consuming. First you've got to submit your site for approval for inclusion in the beta program. The first site I submitted took weeks to get approved. The second only took two days. The developers claim that they're working on a first come, first-served basis. Once you're approved, all you've got to do is paste a single line in one of your site's pages and launch the desktop app. The main screen displays a lot of information. Two charts display pageviews and visits. Your top 20 pages are listed in order of popularity, as are search terms and incoming Google traffic.That's only the start. You can watch visitors come and go in real time (even chat with them via a pop up) or tag certain visitors to chart their history. There are some really nice reports built in. For each of the general categories -- Visitors, System, Pages, Referrers and Searches -- there are several sub-categories. For example, view popular pages, landing pages, exit pages, outgoing links and downloads via easy-to-read, real-time bar graphs. You can even create custom notifications should a given event occur. I love it.It works with the iPhone provided that you upload a certain collection of files to your server (there's no official app). As I said, it isn't quite ready for prime time, but they're definitely going in the right direction.
Mint and iPhone: Two great tastes that taste great together
Mint is an excellent web stats tracking app from Shaun Inman with a powerful, extensible plug-in architecture. The iPhone is an excellent... well you know the rest of that one. While these two things might not have much to do with each other at first glance, a plug-in and a hack have brought us one step closer to having a more minty iPhone experience.First up is a new iPhone Pepper (aka - plug-in) for Mint that formats your stat panes into a single column for better viewing on MobileSafari. Simply install it via the typical Mint procedure, activate it and *boom* - this new pepper stays out of your way when using a real desktop browser, but auto-detects MobileSafari and displays the proper single-column formatting when you're on the go. The drop-down pane atop Mint's admin panel even works, offering quick access to panes way down below with only two taps. Next up on the list of iPhone Mint-ification steps you can take is adding a full-blown Home screen button for Mint, courtesy of iPhone Apper and what looks like the easiest way to get ssh/sftp installed on the iPhone yet.
iComment 4.1 adds comments, trackbacks, webstats to iWeb sites
iComment, as we've mentioned before, allows you to add trackbacks and detailed webstats to iWeb sites, and even comment systems to iWeb sites hosted somewhere besides .Mac. Implementing some of these features can be a bit clunky, as you have to sign up for external services to help drive some of them, however, if you just gotta have comments and webstats the latest version of iComment (4.1) is probably the best way to get the job done.A demo is available, and a license will cost a mere $9.95.
