Okay, this is all over the blogs this morning but I have to talk about it because it’s a subject near and dear to my heart. As some of you may know, I track my browser stats religiously. I’ve developed a shell script that pulls down my logs from my host, gzips them, and then prepares five reports from the data. When I had my laptop at my last job, I would pull down the logs several times a day. I only combed through them during breaks or when I got home, but I still needed to know about the traffic my site was enjoying.
My new host, Dreamhost, prepares three reports using Analog automatically every day. That’s been close enough for me so I don’t run my own reports on every domain I administer. DH’s reports don’t cover everything my own reports do, but they’re close enough and close enough is good enough for a lazy person.
So the big news today is that Google has finally unveiled the fruits of their Urchin acquisition: Google Analytics. Since I’m fairly familiar with Urchin’s reporting capabilities, I signed up as soon as I heard. Urchin has a Javascript-based tracking code snippet that will gather visitor information in real-time and generate reports. The best news of all is that it’s free and easy, both of which make it a no-brainer for me.
All my base are belong to Google.