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Big win IU. Kinda. I mean, who is Northwestern State anyway?

Between FirstTech and MicroCenter, I’m officially done with “mom and pop” shops. They had their chance. Big Box retailers FTW.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about as a matter of strange coincidence is web analytics. While I’ve been pretending to run a website for almost a decade now with several smaller attempts of other peoples’ sites in between, something I’ve never given enough thought to was analytics. Who’s looking my site? Where’d they come from? What keeps them there, or sends them away, or brings them back? It has always been something I took for granted - chugging through my Apache logs and reporting how “popular” I felt this week based on number of hits.

For me, AWstats has been the de facto standard, always available at whatever my site was slash awstats. I’d look, but I didn’t really care. It was just there. But it seems now that the old skool method of analyzing a log file is not only no longer vogue, but probably the worst way of doing it. Google’s Analytics is the latest “beta lab” app, and from what I’ve seen, it does a fairly good job of keeping track of who’s who on your site. Piwik is also going down that road, aiming to be the open source equivalent. Rather pay for your analytics? Great! Have a mint!. Truth be told, I’m not sure what they give you that Google or Piwik doesn’t for that $30, but at least you have the satisfaction that comes with legitimately licensing a product.

All three of those hot, fresh, new analytics sites appear to have one thing in common - no log files necessary. JavaScript calls are placed “somewhere” in your HTML (before the close body tag suggested, but as I’ve seen, not necessary) and a big magic database in the sky keeps track of your visitors. But that’s not even the cool part. These Web2.0 friendly reporting tools all focus on user experience as only a Web2.0 site can. That’s not to say that they shouldn’t, and an easy to read and understand chart goes a long way. Just so long as the focus is balanced between form and function, then all is good in the world.

So, why the mention of AWstats? Because I fear they are on the border of being incredibly irrelevant really, really fast. Yesterday, while working on an intranet project at Big Red, we found that AWstats was having problem with our log file. That led in to the question of whether or not to upgrade, and we quickly learned that in two years, AWstats has only moved from 6.6 ro 6.8, and the latest hadn’t been released into the SuSE online repository. This was just enough of a catalyst for us to start exploring the idea of other tools. It’s sad, though, because I do feel that my old stats package had it right early, but just couldn’t keep up. C’est la vie, I suppose. Progress waits for no person.

Why don’t people understand that “unique” is binary - it is or isn’t. Not “very unique,” not “pretty unique,” not “kinda unique.”