ShortStat Poll
With unruly scalability issues getting the better of the new version of ShortStat I’ve decided to cut my losses, embrace Jason Fried’s “Build half a product not a half-ass product”-mantra and return to ShortStat’s roots—quickly and easily digestible stats.
If ShortStat could track only 3 things about your site what would they be and would those 3 things be enough?
Don’t make any assumptions about what features might be included or leave something off your list because someone else already mentioned it—if you can’t live without it make sure it’s at the top of your list.
080 Comments
For me (and a few of the beta testers I’ve talked to), having fresh data about referrers and popular pages is most important, as is the total number of hits the site has received.
By big three in order of importance: - Top referrers for the past week - Most popular pages for the past week - Total hits
(As the developer I can tell you that the new version will address referrer spam and provide a means of ignoring your own hits. I know, I know, I said don’t assume anything…)
Yep, those are the only three I need. Rollover sound effects culled from “What’s the Word” would be my fourth, if that’s possible.
hmm… only three… for me it would be:
So how can I sign up to be a beta tester? I need to dive back in and try to get it running in Strayhorn. One of the WP support threads suggests adding the include in the footer instead of the header, but I haven’t tried it yet. I’ll let you know.
I like that list, but I prefer visits over hits. Visits is a little more meaningful in my book.
1) Pages requested. 2) Referrers — including search strings. 3) Hits / uniques.
In that order. Broken down by day if I had to choose; daily and weekly would be better.
For most of my sites, search strings is just interesting; it sometimes gives me data that I can’t glean in other ways; and occasionally it sheds invaluable light on the situation. (OH! People are coming here cause of THAT?)
Thanks for making ShortStats available Shaun…
Most Popular Pages Top Referrers Browser Information
I actually took apart shortstat to the basics back when i was using it. the most useful data is: 1. where people are coming from 2. what they’re looking at 3. what search results are leading to your site (for amusement)
Keep up the good work…
Umm…. no offense man, but if there’s one class of applications that are exempt from this rule, it’s stats programs.
Statistics by nature are gatherings of data, displaying the most possible alternatives to raw data you can possibly display so that you, yourself may determine meaningful relationships.
I can understand the thought behind not building a half-assed product, but seriously - statistics are meant to be complicated, and feature rich. Especially with how complicated the internet can be.
Think about how useful the US Census Report would be if there were only three graphs.
First, thanks for what we already have.. and I do like the idea of keeping it tight and trim.
[a} Recent Referrers [b] Repeat Referrers
Popular Pages
Total hits
Maybe the plugin industry would be the best option for those that want bells and whistles, for example Path Stat
Well Kyle, I don’t think ShortStat was ever intended as a complete website statistics tracking suite. It’s meant to be a compact at-a-glance summary of recent activity. The “Short” in ShortStat isn’t a reference to the height of the developer.
(I expect a knee to the nadgers for that one…)
Honestly, I need these three things: a)referrer, b)path through the site, c) who the browser is (ip,browser, and platform are all parts of this piece of info)
But then again, I wrote [PathStats][http://jehiah.com/archive/pathstats] the “plugin” for Shortstat
doh, I can’t remember Markdown syntax at 1:28am
PathStats
Based on my current usage of ShortStat, my list is:
May the new version of ShortStat be anything but a half-assed application — do whatever you have to, and let me know if you can use an extra guy on the test team.
For me:
1) referrers (repeat and current) 2) hits (unique/total) 3) popular pages
I have to know:
Thankyou
For me, it’s always about the information I cannot gather easily by just apache logs. Knowing where they came from and where they went rank one and two, with number 3 being the aggregated standard hits & uniques. Things like browser, path through the site, etc all rank really low for me because that information is able to be collected elsewhere with a buliker slower application designed with that sort of comprehensive stuff in mind.
I know #1 is composite, but it’s the basic function of any counter/statistics tool. I think it goes without saying. I want to be able to track changes in traffic volume (to post more porn if traffic weakens :-)
As for #2, you must get the point. I have a passion for seeing IE going away, slowly but steadly.
No. 3 is important because I want to be able to tell which of my pages are most visited, via google or otherwise.
All in all, if you leave the DB tables unchaged, I usually just run my own SQL on them, in this way, I’m lucky.
Will it be free? Commercial? GPL? BSD?
This may be a long shot but i have developed my own stats program for a different purpose but may be of use to you for future developments?
I wanted to be able to follow the pages that individual users were using, so i grouped all the hits by individual users by their IP. Obviously this is not that accurate as dial up users will have alternating IP’s but i find it invaluable. For everything else i use this fantastic package called ShortStat.
We love you Mr Inman!
For me these are above anything else.
1: Truly unique visitors (that is visitors of real people, i.e. without search engines, robots, automated services etc. - measured against repeat visitors (so that you can see how many truly unique visitors you had in - say - the last month/week/day)
Notice: A truly unique visitor per months is NOT the amount of truly unique visitors per day added up. Instead it is all human visitors counted only once (so if you visit the same site twice in a month, you are only counted once).
2: Truly unique visitors per page
3: Referrers site/page
I’m always interested in:
1) Unique visitors 2) Hits per page 3) Referrers
My three are the ones you have listed there, Shaun.
But even though you may only want to build half a product up front, when you get to building the other half I am down for: - error reporting - search string/location reporting - RSS feed for referrers or daily (or configurable to whatever) digest emails recaps the days stats
My other beef is stuff I have been telling you for awhile anyway. No overflow columns. No rollover tooltips for information. Just get all the info out on a page. I would much rather use my scroll wheel, browser scroll button (for the entire page), or keyboard to make the page move up and down than having to move my mouse over to different scroller all over the page. Hell, you program it and let me design this thing :D
@Steve Smith: you’re getting fuzzy, how do you differentiate between visits and hits? I’m pretty sure that when I say “hits” I mean what you think of as “visits.” Mind clarifying?
@Kyle: No offense taken. As Craig suggests (you can uncross your legs Craig, I’m not the nadger-kneeing type) ShortStat was never meant to be a robust, comprehensive stats package. There are plenty of those out their that do the unenviable job well enough. See also Jakob’s comment above.
@Jon: I’ll build you a custom install that uses ip-to-phone reverse lookup to sends me an email with the info necessary to call each visitor directly and ask them your three questions.
@Gabriel: Not free but cheap.
@Stan: Stan, Stan, Stan. Tooltips are a useful way to add non-critical, supplemental info to a page without overwhelming you with data. But it sounds like you consider the info I’ve added to the tool tips to be too important to be tucked away like that. Don’t worry, I’m listening.
@Shaun: Damn straight. I think it’s just a different sort of problem that needs a different sort of solution. It just seems like a counter intuitive way to display the information because you have to manually interact with it to get a display. And then there is the delay… yatta yatta yatta.
Oops, a referrer RSS feed is a given too. :)
Maybe this is two general, but what I’d really like to know is:
Not that I’m asking much, though.
OT: Congrats again on the SXSW award—well deserved. And don’t worry about the Bloggies, Looby’s site rocks, but your is better-designed any day of the week!
Hmm… I’d say:
For the most part, I pretty much only use the current version of Shortstat to check recent referrers. I use AWStats for more in-deapth tracking.
I’m going to do this blindly without looking at any of the other comments. Okay, well, except for Mike D’s “What’s the Word” rollver sound fx. That’d rock.
Search keywords would be #4 had you asked for 4…
When I hacked together ShortStatom, I pulled in the referrer, the resource requested and the time it was requested. I’ve never gone back to do what I thought I wanted, which was to list the last 36 unique referrers and include a “page views” count as part of the feed. That way, I’d be able to quickly see the top 36 unique referrers to avoid repetition - I don’t really need to see 36 entries of the same referrer - I’d rather see how many of them there were in a single entry.
Oh, and I’m with Stan on the title attributes. I know it makes it more compact, but I don’t consider the info you’ve tucked away in the titles as supplemental… I consider it very useful.
In fact, what I think I’d really like to see is different facets of the same data. I’d like to be able to see the last XX unique referrers for a particular resource, for example.
@Derek: So your three things are: - Most recent unique referrers (the unique was assumed in my post but clarity is a good thing) - Most recent referrers for a particular resource - … I think you’ve got one more :)
My personal favorite is unique visitors by month.
-Unique Visitors in the last month -Top referrers in the last week -Top pages in the last week
My list, in order of importance:
Personally, I love the ability to track visitors by country. For a bare bones, simple, and free stat package, I think it might be overkill, though. I’d love to get this functionality from shortstat, If I can’t, maybe I can go elsewhere, or maybe I can Live without it. The essentials for me are in line with everyone else.
I agree, get back to what’s important.
On my shortstat I always check out my Recent Referrers and occasionally my Repeat Referrers and Search Strings… after that it’s a bi-weeky look at the rest. Could it be simplified? Yes. Should anything be removed? You’re asking the wrong guy…
stright up… top three
word…
It’s unfortunate that I can only pick three but since I must I’d have to say:
I’m also interested in being a beta tester, if you’re open to the idea. I know I don’t have some of the numbers that other testers might have but I’d like to help out any way that I can.
Hits
queries editable on the frontend!
I typically use the most of:
I would rather not limit it to that, but hey, do what you can:) If anything, atleast the full breakdown of hits is useful, and the search strings keep me on target.
I’d say the main reason people read their stats are to see 1. “what did I do right?”, 2. “what did I do wrong?”, and 3. “who noticed?”.
Translating that into the top 3 items, I’d expect to see: 1) Popular pages 2) Page errors (404, etc) 3) Referrers (preferably with individual hit counts)
My three are:
Is there any chance I could be a beta tester if you are looking for more help? Also, maybe you could offer the current beta as an “AS-IS” download, not a real release?
I think the top three are (although not necessarily in this order):
1) ‘Referrer’ module Since you already have the search terms available for consumption in the referrer string (for the referrals from search engines) you could essentially drop the ‘search’ module or make the more detailed info it provides available in a drilldown report on a seperate page
2) ‘Resources’ module plus a little visitor data This is essential for me… and with the IP tracking code I sent you it would take care of showing me which visitor viewed what page.
3) ‘Hits’ module with some slight hotrodding You already show hits and uniques, but you could further break them down by type i.e. Hits, Uniques, Robots, People, Feedreaders, etc…
I know you want to keep it sleek. For my site what bogs things down is the ‘User Agents’ module and the country & language tabs. There is a bit of irony in the fact those are the 3 least used parts of the interface for me.
Overall Shaun you’ve got a great app as I’ve told you before and I think you’re going the right direction with the slimmer dataset. With some database structure mods, SQL tweaks and some of your other wizardry I’m sure you’ll crank out another winner.
Sorry I missed you at SXSW and congrats on the award, holla’ if you want/need anything …
If I need to get information more detailed than that, I can always look at my server stats.
Saw this on slashdot today:
I would like to be able to determine if my page was prefetched … well not so much that I would like to determine that becase at the moment my site is empty :-D.
I imagine some people might like to know if their hits are coming because of browser prefetching, which google has enabled for its firefox users ( google.com/help/features.html#prefetch ).
I agree exactly with a previous comment… 1) Pages (Resources) 2) Referrers — including search strings. 3) Hits / uniques — with unique visits being much more important than hits.
However by losing the browser data it would be important in the hits/visits to see the % of traffic from robots.
Thanks for a great app.
Having not had a chance to play with it yet, I can’t speak with great certainty, but I imagine ShortStats is skinnable with CSS. So, to answer Stan, why not use CSS3 to insert the tooltip content into the body of the page? That way Shaun can continue to use markup and structure that suits him (and makes semantic sense, BTW… I often do the same thing). Since this is a “private” app (i.e. you are likely to be the only one using it), you have a lock on your audience and its preferred browser (e.g. you and anything but IE) and can use CSS3 without worrying about leaving users behind.
1) Referrers 2) Most Popular Pages 3) Visits
I’ve been suprised to see so many people here requesting hits. While hits may be entertaining, it seems to me that they’re some of the least important information shortstat provides.
The information that I find the most helpful is: a) Referrers b) Resources c) search strings d) Browser
These answer my main questions: How are people getting to my site; what are they looking at once they get there, and what they’re using to view it.
I realize that’s four, but I really can’t imagine shortstat trimmed down to only three charts.
Other than that, I think Jon Hicks nailed it ;)
Wait — ShortStat 1.0 is not going to be free?
Oh, here we go.
You read that correctly Matthew (nice site), the next major revision of ShortStat (which may not even be called ShortStat) will not be free.
I’ll talk about my motivation for this decision and the benefits it will have for ShortStat supporters as the project nears completion but I’d rather keep this thread on topic for now.
Hits (Daily, Monthly, Yearly | Uniques, Total, etc) Referrers Client environment (browser, resolution, etc)
:)
@Shaun: Now that I read my comment, it did seem a little vague. What I meant was it’s more important to me to know the number of people who came to the site, rather than how many page views were counted. I think they’re both important, but if I had to choose, I’d pick the number of unique people that visited.
Ah, gotcha. I thought you were differentiating between files (meaning all files, images and css included) and actual people. But you’re talking more about total page views versus unique visitors. Both (total page views/unique visitors) will be tracked so no worries there.
1) unique visits 2) referrers 3) resources
also search bots need to be identified correctly in browser rather than the generic “crawler/search engine”
Exit links would be nice. You could implement them with a type of Ajax technique like: More Accessible Exit Links
Sorry the link is to my own website.
That should be easy enough to implement with the new system Jeremy. Good call. Nice site too, thanks for the link.
1) Where they came from (Referrer) 2) Browser/Platform Used 3) How they found you (search variables)
I know they are the most requested, but that is what I find the most important on any statistical counter. I just want to know where they came from, how they got there and what they are viewing it with.
-t
1) Referrers 2) Unique hits 3) Pathstats - I realize that this was added on by another developer
Basically I like being able to see where hits are coming from and what people are doing once they are on the site. Is there a way to track how long a person is on page once exit links are implemented?
Yes, I know you’ve been waiting for my response, so here we go.
Where can i download the shortstat?
Here is all I require of ShortStat:
Looking forward to the next revision. Cheers!
In order of importance to me:
I tell you what, Shaun - right now my list is Total Hits/Total Hits/Total Hits - because these Dreamhost Webstats aren’t cutting it, and Reinvigorate snuck out the window while I wasn’t looking…
It works great. but it seems i have a old one, i-marco.nl has more options, can somebody tel me how too upgrade and where i can find it! take a look at schiroli.nl/shortstat
hi, i want to see the real time visitor stats i.e. number of people online, where they are
browser / platform / language info are boring. they can be excluded immediately ..
I’m loving ShortStat for two months now. I don’t know what to cut out, really.
Can I throw a quick question? It seems Safari 1.3 is identified as Safari 312. Any clue on how to fix this? Thanks in advance.
I’m most interested in unique visitors, referrers, and most popular pages. I’m sure that if I could only know those three things, though, I’d end up curious about search strings and other data.
Although the info on hits, visits and search engines is valuable. As a designer and programmer the most important things I need to know are more opporational. I need to know what systems I am dealing with, so my big 3 are;
SHORTSTAT is perfect allready - I am using PATHSTATS “plugin” too - so it gives me enough information about recent visitors…
maybe You can open new project on sourceforge and find a team that will develop best stat app ever :-)
.
The problem I had with Safari 1.3 was so easy to be fixed. Silly me! Just a few more lines made it work alright. What you have to know is just this:
Safari 1.3 = Apple WebKit v312 Safari 2.0 = Apple WebKit v412
Also thanks XIN for letting me know about PathStats. It works perfect with ShortStat.
Mint?
Recent Referrers browsers
How’s that half-a-project coming?
Hi I’ve installed ShortStat and did the config changes you’ve suggested, uploaded the directory in root and when I went to configure it cI got this error message.
“The necessary tables could not be created. I know, I know, this isn’t a very helpful error message…”
any suggestions?
thanks
Pete
I think for me, the things I would like to see are some kind of export dump and hourly stats to know who is coming to the site from where and when. Honestly, the thing is great right now. I am not in any way complaining.
So, in order: 1. Export monthly an XML or CSV file. 2. Hourly stats 3. I am with MIJLEE on the Resolution/Colors thing
only 3?? well i look at them in this order
i combined some to squeeze in more that 3