Analytics

Who the gods would destroy, they first give real-time analytics. (Ha.) Because not waiting for a reliable sample is bad, bad statistics.

That said, I do want real-time reporting on incoming links and searches, and Google Analytics is abysmal on that front, as I've mentioned in the past. Now that I've moved the static content at Vivtek.com over onto Github ... well. I did that a year and a half ago, but now that I'm writing again and care about incoming interest, and given that I don't have my raw traffic logs any more because that's not something Github does, I need something better than Google stats.

The answer is a system I've noted in passing before: Piwik. It not only includes the JS bug to phone home, it also provides full reporting in a dashboard you configure on your own host. As soon as I get two minutes, I'm going to go ahead and convert Vivtek.com to Piwik, and then I can actually know what people want to read about.

App analytics and tracking

A spare how-to.

Analytics applied to MarioKart

This is pretty fun: Kartlytics. It's a Joyent fun article presenting their product Manta, which is an object store apparently for Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS, I like that).

Cool stuff all the way down.

Sleek

Analytics in Ruby. I haven't really turned my attention to analytics, which is essentially "reporting on events".

Better analytics

HNN had a pretty interesting thread up due to Analytics.js, an open-source aggregator for all your analytics frameworks calls.  There are also two open-source JS analytics tools mentioned: Piwik.org and OWA Open Web Analytics, both of which look pretty nice.

Here's the thing: set up your events and analysis carefully and you can use your analytics as a workflow feed.  Metrics and alarms can trigger any kind of action.  That integrates directly into your business processes, and you're halfway cyborged.  That's the goal.

Google stats on Blogger are essentially useless

The new Blogger UI presents basic stats integrated right into the blogging interface, so I see them.  And they are utterly useless.  Yesterday's post about shell command apps has garnered 48 hits.  From where?  Why?  No idea.  I do see 43 hits (to somewhere on the blog) from a porn site in Russia - which is, yes, a way of spamming my stats reports, thank you very much.

I can only see the top 10 search phrases that brought people here.  That's, yes, useless - on a blog with a topic as sprawling as the intersection between programming and semantics, of all things, the phrases indicating people's interests must number in the hundreds or thousands.  But I can't see them, so I don't actually know what people are interested in reading about.

It's enough to make me write my own analytics platform.  Just for Blogger, and just to track what I actually want to track.

Update 2012-12-12: and I'm not the only one - see my post today on Better analytics!  I need to set up a feed for search terms.