Vincent’s Blog

Some days ago I found Piwik, an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

I installed and started monitoring the portuguese version of Blog do Vicente. For an open source project that is on 0.2 version yet, the results are quite impressive. If you want to check the results of this monitoring click here.

Monitoring access to your website is a hard task. Many accesses can be assumed as users, like spammers activity or sites as Technorati, can drive the webmaster to an analysis error. Beside, eventually, some ad blockers could avoid Google Analytics scripts to work. It is very “healthful” to monitor the accesses on your website with a second tool to validate the results of the first one. In this task Piwik can be a very good choice.

Piwik advatanges:

- Easy installation. Just create database, unzip the installation files an follow a wizard from browser.

- Realtime statistics.

- Can be installed on the same server that your site/blog, narrowing possibilities from blocking by users, improving reliability of generated statistics.

- Statistics almost good as Google Analytics.

- Can be integrated to Wordpress 2.5 or superior using a plugin.

- You can insert the charts on your website easily.

- Simple architeture: LAMP is enogh.

Problems:

- Probably will consume more resources from your server than you own website.

- If you don’t have an own server, you can’t install.

- Growing database. One week of monitoring of a 1000 users per day consume 25 MiB of space.

Wanna install or test? Access Piwik.org.

Don’t have place to install? No problem, comment this post and I can set a monitoring for you in my server for 1 month. No money needed, just a link for english.blogdovicente.com on your blogroll.

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