Tag Archive for ‘stats’ at T. Longren

Tag Archive for 'stats'

Reinvigorate Snoop

Published

on June 18, 2007

. 3 Comments Tags: analytics, Internet, Personal, reinvigorate, software, stats, webstats.

Reinvigorate has released a tool called Snoop that will stream live web stats to your desktop. For those of you who have never heard of Reinvigorate, it’s a website analytics solution similar to Google Analytics. Snoop includes some pre-defined events, such as new visitors and notification of returning visitors. You can also setup custom events. Custom events can be created on any website that supports JavaScript. Snoop is available for Windows and Mac currently, I’m hoping they have plans to build a GTK2 interface for Linux.

Snoop interacts with your Reinvigorate account, displaying current visitors and the pages they’re viewing in real time. It even displays comments if a reader posts a comment. Here’s some features available in Snoop:

Real-time Notification
A dedicated asynchronous (non-polling) connection is maintained with Reinvigorate. You’ll know the instant someone makes a comment on your blog, posts in your forum, purchases an item, gets referred from another site, etc..

Audible Events
Each event triggers a unique sound. If you’re caught up in your work, or in another room, you don’t have to worry about missing events.

Name Tag Integration
Snoop features automatic integration with Name Tags so you’ll know exactly who your visitors are.

I’ve been using Snoop on my Windows desktop at work for the last week or so and absolutely love it. I really wish there was some sort of interface for Linux so I could watch visitors at home. I’m NOT going to install Windows at home just so I can use Snoop, although it is tempting. :)

Popularity: 11% [?]

I’ve Been Reinvigorated

Published

Tyler

on February 28, 2007

in Internet, Noteworthy, Personal and WordPress

. 1 Comment Tags: analytics, Internet, Noteworthy, performance, Personal, reinvigorate, software, stats, webstats, WordPress.

Reinvigorate is really nice. It’s a website statistics package, similar to Google Anlaytics and Mint. On the Reinvigorate home page, the service is described as “Measurement, performance, and regression analysis tools for evolving websites and blogs of all sizes”, sweet. Anyway, I signed up for the private beta a long time ago and finally received an invitation a few days ago.

Dougal Campbell has blogged about reinvigorate a couple times, check his posts out for some more background information on Reinvigorate.

Reinvigorate gives a really unique view of your website or blog, especially when it comes to tracking individual users. They also have a neat feature called “Name Tags”. Name Tags associate information on your website or blog (names, email addresses, etc) with the session id assigned by Reinvigorate. For example, this lets me track commenters based on the name they use when commenting. If someone comments, the name they used in the comment will show up in Reinvigorate. This makes it easy to see all the pages the commentor visited and how much time they spent on each page. Reinvigorate describes Name Tags as follows:

Name Tags are an easy way to identify exactly who your visitors are.

It works by associating information your site manages (username, e-mail, account ID, etc..) with the session ID Reinvigorate uses to track visitors on your site/blog.

It’s extremely simple to setup, even if your site uses its own proprietary user account system. 1-2 extra lines of code and we take care of the rest.

Name Tags are extremely simple to make use of if you use WordPress. Reinvigorate has a plugin for WordPress that makes using Name Tags a breeze. The plugin also prevents you from having to manually add the tracking code to your blog. You can turn on Name Tags right from the plugin options page. Just activate the plugin, enter your tracking id, turn Name Tags on or off, and you’re set.

I’m really happy with Reinvigorate after using it for only two days. It’s exciting to know it’s still in beta, so hopefully they’ll continue to add features and more options. One thing I would really like is the ability to select a date range to view data for. Especially for the search terms, I want to see my top search terms over certain periods of time. Same goes for popular pages too.

If you haven’t already, go sign up for the beta. You may have to wait a while for an invitation, but it’s worth the wait. I can’t wait to see what the developers have planned for Reinvigorate in the future.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Mint 2.0 Bird Feeder and WordPress

Published

Tyler

on February 3, 2007

in Internet and Personal

. 0 Comments Tags: analytics, blog, blogs, Internet, mint, pepper, Personal, PHP, shaun-inman, software, stats, web, web-stats, webstats.

Shaun Inman has released version 2.0 of Mint, my favorite website analytics software. Go over to the Mint website and have a look at what’s new in version 2.0.

If you’re a Mint 1.x user, you’ll have to pay another $19 to make the upgrade to 2.0. I purchased the upgrade for version 2.0 earlier this week and finally got around to actually upgrading earlier today. The $19 is well worth the upgrade, Mint 2.0 brings many nice new features, like the Bird Feeder pepper for example:

Your RSS and Atom feeds attract all kinds of colorful wildlife, Bird Feeder is a window onto that activity. It highlights subscription trends across multiple Feeds and clicks on individual Seeds. What’s a seed? That’s bird-ese for an article or link within a feed.

Upgrading from Mint 1 was pretty painless, the only thing I’ve had issues with is the Bird Feeder pepper. There seems to be quite a bit of confusion about installing the Bird Feeder pepper. I haven’t really finished installing the Bird Feeder pepper, I don’t want to risk breaking my feeds. I’ve been watching this thread over at the Mint forums for tips. Recently, a forum user linked to a post by Kristin Pishdadi, who has posted a how-to for getting Bird Feeder working with WordPress 2. She spells out step by step what needs to be done to get Bird Feeder working with your WordPress feeds. Looks pretty straight forward, I wonder if it works the same if the WordPress Feedburner plugin is being used. I need to read up some on how exactly that Feedburner plugin works first I guess.

The wp-mint plugin for WordPress should still work fine with Mint 2.0. All the javascript in Mint 2.0 is included in exactly the same fashion it was in Mint 1.x, so that plugin should still work 100%.

So, if you’re having trouble getting the Bird Feeder pepper working with WordPress, go check out Kristin’s post, it’ll probably take care of your problems. It’s a lot more clear about installation than the readme that’s included with the Bird Feeder pepper. The Mint forums are an excellent resource for support issues of all types, check them out if you have problems outside the scope of Kristin’s post.

Popularity: 9% [?]

20,000 Unique

Published

Tyler

on November 13, 2006

in Internet, Noteworthy and Personal

. 0 Comments Tags: blog, blogging, Internet, longren.org, Personal, stats.

Just a few minutes ago, I saw 20,000 unique visitors here at longren.org. I started tracking about one year ago when I first started using Mint.

I thought it’d be 2+ years before I saw 20,000 unique visitors, guess I was way off. I never anticipated releasing a theme for WordPress or joining some of the blogging communities I’m a member of. Yay for 20,000! I’ll be at 40,000 uniques by early May, hopefully.

Popularity: 6% [?]

SlimStat: Free Web Stats

Published

Tyler

on May 24, 2006

in Internet and Personal

. 2 Comments Tags: blog, blogging, blogs, code, PHP, plugins, short-stat, shortstat, slim-stat, slimstat, software, stats, traffic, web-stats, WordPress, wordpress-plugin.

SlimStat is a nice little PHP software package designed to help you track visits to your website or blog. Download Squad had a post about SlimStat this morning that sparked my interest.

I’ve been using Shaun Inman’s great ShortStat for a while. However, I wanted to be able to drill down into the stats and look at things in more detail.

When I started editing the code, I kept thinking of more and more things I’d like to change. SlimStat is the result.

SlimStat is based on ShortStat. ShortStat is no longer being developed. Instead the original author of ShortStat (Shaun Inman), is now working on Mint, which I’ve been using for the last few months. But none of that has anything to do with SlimStat. SlimStat has a different developer (Stephen Wettone). He just picked up where Shaun left off basically.

Blogging Pro also has a post about SlimStat, and a related WordPress plugin, WP-SlimStat. Although, the WordPress plugin uses SlimStat 0.9.2 where the current release of SlimStat is 0.9.4.

Popularity: 4% [?]

More on Google Analytics

Published

Tyler

on November 16, 2005

in Internet, Personal and Search

. 4 Comments Tags: ajax, blog, blogs, flash, google, google-analytics, news, services, slashdot, stats, tech, technology, urchin, WordPress, www, yahoo.

I really like Google Analytics right off the bat. After getting to see some of the reports generated, I’m basically hooked. It just has an overall nice and pleasant way of showing what’s been happening on your site. I like the map, although I’d prefer an integrated Google Maps interface, instead of the Flash. But, there’s a lot of things that could really improve Google Analytics in my eyes.

Hopefully Google has some nice changes in store for Google Analytics, formerly Urchin, now that they’ve changed the name and have gone a totally different direction as far as marketing and product branding goes.

I don’t like the fact that the data used to generate the reports isn’t live. It took about 36 hours for any data to show up in my reports. And it took even longer for Analytics to realize I had installed the code on another site I had setup. I have no doubt they’re experiencing some pretty extreme server loads. Hopefully this is one of those things that will get better as the initial hype dies down. Google Reader was unusable for at least a couple days after it’s initial announcement. Performance got better after a couple days but didn’t improve enough for me to possibly use it as my every day feed reader.

One feature I’d really appreciate in Google Analytics would be the ability to export reports to PDF. I may have to try exporting one of the report pages to PDF in IE. I’m not sure if there’s a FireFox extension to create PDF’s from webpages.

I’m sorta surprised to see Google offer a free web reporting tool before they have a free live web stats package. Especially a tool like Urchin/Google Analytics, it’s got to have serious potential to make money. Maybe I’m wrong though, maybe that’s why the previous owners sold it to Google.

It’s gonna be useful to me no matter what. I’m excited to hopefully try it out on a few sites that make use of AdWords. There’s a lot of features in Google Analytics that are specifically for conversion tracking from AdWords and I believe Overture. All that’s involved is tagging links used in your search marketing campaigns and then letting Google Analytics know about those tags. That’s only if you use a paid search service other than AdWords. Google AdWords accounts automatically share conversion data with Analytics, provided the accounts are properly linked. There’s even a URL builder to assist in building tagged links for ads.

Should be fun.

Popularity: 5% [?]