I have no problem admitting I’m a bit of a stat nut. Not so much to the point where I do this explicitly to see how many thousands of people come pouring in when I post something, but since I’m doing it, and since it’s publicly available, I might as well get curious re: who takes an interest, from where, in what exactly and for how long. I have equally no problem admitting I’m kind of a sucker for RSS feeds. In fact, I already have. So when you take both of these, slap them together, you get a project I have to play with.
So, enter yet another stats related experiment. I test drove, and eventually ended up, sticking with Statcounter for realtime statistics gathering–I even hooked Jessica up with it not long ago. For the broader perspective, like watching collectively what’s gaining or losing strength, I stick with Google Analytics. But I’ve been curious about ways to minimise the number of places I have to look to get a decent idea of how active things are getting. Since I already live in my RSS reader of choice most of the day anyway–some of that which is mock worthy comes from there, after all, and since I’m not the type to refresh the stats page every 10 minutes just in case someone happens to drop by, when I came across something that would let me slap certain collective stats into an RSS feed, I figured why the hell not. So I signed up yesterday afternoon with Clicky, a realtime statistics engine a la Statcounter that gives me that kind of access.
Like statcounter, and to an extent Google Analytics, it shows you where people are coming from, where they’re going on your site, and what if anything they searched for to get there. Unlike Statcounter, but more like Google Analytics, it lets you drill down to get more detailed access to the specifics of a particular user, including–I’m gathering based on what I’ve seen so far–what they’ve accessed on your site in previous visits, since Clicky started tracking. Unlike either of the two, it supposedly still manages to keep track of certain things in the event folks show up with javascript disabled. And, also unlike either of the two, it gives you the option of not so much as lookiing at their website should you decide not to–by letting you keep track of, in my opinion anyway, the important things in individualised RSS feeds. I’ve only been playing with it for less than 24 hours, but so far, I’m liking what I’m seeing. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it’ll replace either or both of my stats packages I currently use, but at the very least, it’s a nifty little distraction. We’ll find out soon enough if I’m still distracted by it. In the meantime, time to go find something mock worthy.