Looking For Stats in All the Wrong Places

It's been three days since either the main site, the forums, or my user site responded at all, and I think it's time to admit that my beloved StatCounter is dead, dead, dead. Which leaves me in need of a new stat-gathering service, and so far they've all been depressingly awful. I gave Google Analytics the old college try, but it's clearly oriented towards business users and drowns me with useless information while ignoring or burying the data I need. For example, it only lists referrring sites by the root directory, which might make sense if you're running a business, but when trying to engage in a coversation, there's a huge difference between a person clicking through from anybody.livejournal.com and someone coming from anybody.livejournal.com/friends, or between a person who clicks through from a blog entry posted six months ago or this afternoon.

So, does anyone out there have a good (free) website statistics service to recommend? I'm looking for something that offers a good at-a-glance summary--StatCounter used a simple bar graph that listed page loads, individual visitors, and repeat visitors for each day--as well as decent referral logs and search keywords (and while we're on the subject: I've been tickled pink at the number of hits--most recently in the area of once a day--this entry gets from searches along the lines of 'I changed my screen's resolution on Windows and now everything's gone black'). Visitor paths would be nice--I've found them a most comfortable tool when trying to understand how people are using the site--but not necessary. Most importantly, I do not want a mandatory counter on the site, and a huge banner ad on every page is out of the question.

My other option, I suppose, is to switch over to another service, which is something that I've been considering for a while, and the reasons to do it have been piling up. I know WordPress offers web stats--any word on how good they are? Also, does anyone know how feasible/difficult it would be to move over AtWQ's archives (comments included) to another blog service?

UPDATE: It is risen! Behold the power of complaining!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 2023 Hugo Awards: Somehow, It Got Worse

The last month has been a busy one in Hugo and Worldcon fandom. After the shock of the much-belated 2023 nominating stats, and their revelation of serious irregularities in the compilation of the award's ballot, there was a great ferment of conversation and action. Mainstream publications have caught wind of the scandal and publicized it far and wide . Turnover in the few permanent committees that oversee the Hugo trademark and intellectual property has been high . The poor folks at the upcoming Glasgow Worldcon have been scrambling to respond to the evolving situation and to distance themselves from the previous committee—including, most recently, making a laconic announcement that they would refuse any of Chengdu's passalong funds, the budgetary surplus that is traditionally bequeathed from one Worldcon to the next. And stats nerds—of which this community is, unsurprisingly, blessed with a surfeit—have been furiously crunching the nominations numbers and EPH calculations...
Read more

The 2023 Hugo Awards: Now With an Asterisk

It's been a while since we've had one of these dramas. On Saturday, the nominating stats for the 2023 Hugo awards, which were announced in Chengdu, China in October 2023, were released to the public . There was a great deal of anticipation for these numbers, in no small part because of their much-delayed release. Though the WSFS constitution permits Hugo administrators to wait as long as 90 days before releasing the voting and nominating stats, most Hugo teams have them ready to go within minutes of the ceremony's conclusion. Chengdu, in contrast, waited the full allotted period, and even went a little bit over (the voting stats were released separately in December). Once the stats were released, it quickly became clear why the Chengdu Hugo team were hesitant to make them public. There are any number of irregularities and questionable choices in this document that suggest everything from erratic voter behavior, to incompetent collation and calculation of the nomination rank...
Read more

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

The first thing that must be said about this movie is that it should not work. It's a prequel to one of the most mind-blowing, groundbreaking, and just plain revolutionary action movies of the 21st century—and prequels are a bad idea in most cases, but all the more so when the character they revolve around has already given you their entire backstory in their original introduction, which is also the final, culminating act of their character arc. (To put it another way, if you had asked me, nine years ago, which character I thought offered more fertile ground for prequel storytelling, Imperator Furiosa or Han Solo, I would have picked Han without a moment's hesitation, and I don't even like Han that much.) And it's a follow-up to a movie whose chief virtue lies in its conciseness—in being a single, drawn-out, pulse-pounding, increasingly deranged car chase. Which means you can either try to repeat that accomplishment, which will inevitably feel a bit old hat; or you can ...
Read more