Almost every website owner tracks the statistics of their websites with the free and powerful Google Analytics.

The service has made a huge step forward with its "live stats" feature which shows the instant activity.

There are very few reasons left to use another solution to track stats where one of them is the lack of "live overall stats" (as Google Analytics still displays the overall stats with a delay) and the other is the need for using an open source system.

For anyone looking to see the overall stats in real-time and needs a simple/lightweight solution (compared to other options like Piwik), ChiliStats is an alternative.

The application is free, open source, built with PHP and uses MySQL for storing the data.

It presents a snapshot of the statistics -supported with charts- in a "OneView" page and sub-pages for viewing top-referrers, visited pages or referring keywords exist. And, a "History" page allows digging the statistics of past months.

ChiliStats also offers a stats counter widget to be integrated inside web pages.

GAget is a Mac OS X widget for anyone willing to see the important Google Analytics stats quickly and frequently.

It displays the number of visits, new visitors and bounces with a chic interface.

The widget is not limited to a single site and it is easy to switch between profiles (also, multiple instances can be used).

jStat is a JavaScript library which enables you to perform advanced statistical operations without the need of a dedicated statistical language.

Simply, it focuses on being a real JavaScript-based alternative for languages like R and MATLAB.

The library is standalone, however, for the plotting functionality, it requires jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery-flot plugin.

For a web designer/developer, having a detailed knowledge about the overall web-related statistics is pretty valuable to better analyze what you're actually doing is right (and better) or not.

HTTP Archive is a website which applies regular checks on 17,000+ websites, collects information and outputs web development -related, up-to-date reports.

The reports are categorized as trends and stats where trends include:

• average response times
• HTML/CSS/JS/image sizes and the number of requests
• Page Speed scores
• and more..

and stats include:

• popular JavaScript libraries
• popular scripts
• pages using Google Libraries API
• pages using Flash
• and more..

HTTP Archive is an open source project where you can easily perform a custom install and run more frequent checks, create new reports and/or get the stats for a different set of websites.

SOFA is an open source statistics, analysis, & reporting application that can collect data from a selected source.

It doesn't force you to work with an offline data and can connect to various live databases including:

• MySQL
• SQLite
• PostgreSQL
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Microsoft Access

by just mentioning your login details. After that, you can customize the reports to be generated by selecting any columns from the tables and by applying filters.

Optionally, it is possible to import data from Excel spreadsheets, ODS spreadsheets, CSV files and Google Docs spreadsheets.

SOFA creates beautiful and interactive HTML outputs (powered with JavaScript). Also, it has tabular outputs that can be directly opened in MS Excel or pasted into OpenOffice Calc.

If small things change in your dataset, you don't need to re-import data but they can be edited manually.

There are many ready-to-use reports like row and column percentages, mean, median, standard deviation, min – max and more.

While using an analytics application, ability to analyze the funnel users go through to reach an event is a very valuable way for understanding users and improving leads.

Using Google Analytics, it is possible to get a report like:

• users who browsed the product details page –>
• downloaded the brochure –>
• purchased the product –>
• used PayPal.

by using many segments, filters and exporting data.

PadiTrack, a totally free application that can do this very easily for you.

It connects to your Google Analytics account (no tracking code required) and pulls the data automatically + instantly.

The greatest part of it is that segments can be applied to the funnels so you get to see how people converted from different traffic sources

W3Perl is an open source analytics application that doesn't require any code to be inserted into websites for monitoring.

Rather, it goes through the log files generated on the server-side and creates the reports in real-time.

The application is not limited to web servers and it can also render the logs of  FTP, Squid, CUPS and mail servers.

W3Perl stores the data for a period configured and can display statistics from hours to years.

It can provide information on many details about the visitors like their countries, browsers, screen sizes and pages they browsed, the amount of traffic created and much more.

TraceWatch is an open source and free website analytics application that works real-time.

With the help of an easy-to-use interface, the application has everything for making a deep analysis of websites (like visitors, pageviews, browsers, referrers, robots and much more).

It can track both static and dynamic web pages with the choice of PHP or JavaScript tracking codes.

TraceWatch offers private and/or public stats report pages (which is great for sharing the data).

The application is highly customizable and has a powerful admin menu that can control almost every aspect of it.

It is multilingual and requires PHP/MySQL + uploading few files to function.

SlimStat is an open source web analytics application that collects & presents statistics information about your website.

It is built with PHP-MySQL & can be integrated into websites with JavaScript (like Google Analytics) or PHP.

For  the given period, the application can display:

• the number of visitors/pageviews
• referrer URLs, domains
• search terms
• browsers, OSs, countries, screen sizes

There is also a "paths" feature that shows a user's browsing path page-by-page.

You may be asking, "why to use SlimStat instead of Google Analytics?" The best answer would be "live stats".

FeedBurner's popular chicklet FeedCount is the most-used way to display the number of subscribers for a feed.

Also, a similar design is used by TwitterCounter to display your Twitter followers.

We'll be creating a dynamic FeedCount-like interface that can display your website's statistics like pageviews, visits, etc. (one or all of them) using PHP.

At the end of this tutorial, we'll have 2 different counters:

• a counter that can display only one metric – basic version
• a counter that can display multiple metrics (some jQuery fun here) – advanced version

Read the rest of this entry »