Analytics 2: the Analyzing

[demiurgent]

Wednesday, who is a professional, pointed Mint out to me, which she got up and running for me.

Oh, holy crap dude. This is awesome. By far the best tracking/referral/popularity thing I've ever touched. Weds is right. Weds rocks. And it's realtime, in a way that actually works.

Of course, now I'm rethinking strategies moving forward -- I'm stunned at how much traffic the archives get. Stunned with stunning. And I can watch as they spread (the Silent Garfield stuff, for example, seems to be propagating again.)

Man, this is just awesome.

Comments

[wednesday]

I've been over the Javascript tracking issues with Eric. I hear what you're saying; it's not just the paranoid users I'm concerned about (seriously, they want to cloak themselves from view and/or not play with the pretties, I'm happy to let them be). It's also the ones who simply can't play, period.

But even if that chunk of users who, for whatever reason, don't have the Javascriptery on is statistically significant for our purposes? We can pull a heck of a lot of data from the reportedly monumental hordes who do.

Unfortunately, the state of analytics these days is Javascriptalicious unless you're doing everything yourself, which isn't practical for us at the moment. (Analog just wasn't cutting it -- the numbers couldn't be reconciled with anything else, for starters.)

Besides, you should see some of the companies using websidestory-cum-HBX-cum-Omniture Whatever instead of crunching on their Apache logs. (And the Javascript snippet the size of my ass that comes with. That footprint's got New Rocks on.) You gotta figure this approach works well enough as pale-grey-hat web tricks go.

Mint gives me more useful and coherent data than I've seen from HBX, too, I tell you what. Even if some of that useful data is "no, Weds, we can't have nice permalinks; the 404 would confuse people."

Don't know how scalable it is once you start looking at massive server clusters; if we get to that point, I have a hell of a lot more to worry about. ;) Someone hires me on as a full-time standardista, we'll talk about my stupid little Xserve dreams. I'd probably still run multiple Mint licenses over the alternatives I've seen lately.

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

...you know, I can probably get you an XServe.

[cdave]

I'm afraid I'm one of those who only enables javascript where needed.

Then again, I read via websnark cia bloglines so wouldn't get picked up on a site counter anyway.