Stat Counter Battles
March 18, 2004
Recently I've been trying to keep track of who shows up at the site and how they get here. I've gone through a number of different hosted stat counter options, not many of which are good.
The first I used was eXTReMe Tracking which is a pretty decent service for free. They don't hold a limit over your head and, as I said, it's free. The downside is a visual link on your page by which anyone can view your stats. In some ways, I like to let people watch the stats but in other ways, I don't. This was dumped after a fairly long time for a newer service brought to my attention by Joel Blain on the TypePad Forums. That service was the data archiving services of Re_Invigorate. While Re_Invigorate was quite pretty, it lacked real functionality and some of the features of the other stat services. It went the way of the dodo for me soon enough and StatCounter took it's place. StatCounter was nice and pretty and quite functional too but it only remembered your last 100 hits in detail and this got annoying after a while. I only recently moved to a stat service I've never heard of before this. It's called PowerPhlogger and I think that the free version is hosted on their servers... the pay version is self-hostable I guess. That confused me at first. It says that it only hosts 10,000 hits for the free version but that is a lot more than 100. I think I'll stick with this for a while and I'll update with my later impressions.
Comments
Interesting. I like Re_Invigorate but since it's open source and it got mentioned on Waxy.org and some other big blogs it's slowed down a ton with all the new users.
Posted by: Joel | March 18, 2004 3:10 PM
I like re-invigorate too (lovely to hear the *Dings* as visitors arrive) but it got really slow a few months back and I keep forgetting to go back.
Posted by: Daisy | March 23, 2004 5:22 PM
Forgot to add: SiteMeter is excellent but it's had a lot of downtime recently.
Posted by: Daisy | March 23, 2004 5:33 PM
Well, PowerPhlogger was removed because it just wasn't counting all the hits. It counted all of 8 hits in two days which is just strange. Now statcounter is giving me problems with numbers.
I think I'm going to have to write my own stat script.
Posted by: authgeek | March 23, 2004 5:58 PM