A dedicated blog/CMS stat viewer
Posted by Ian Holsman
I must be getting a reputation for being anal retentive about monitoring and stats. I have just been invited to a ‘alpha’ (I thought people went straight to beta and stayed there until they IPO’d) of a new web-based stat tool called Measure Map which is from Adaptive Path.
I’ve spent half an hour with it and this is what makes it interesting.
It measures articles+comments, not pages. I’m not sure how it copes with the standard front door with multiple articles on the front door.. I’ll find out when america wakes up and I get some page views ;-)
You need to modify the code itself. with most of the other popular stat monitors you just add a single javascript file. It is easy enough to do if you can be bothered (and you have access to the source to do it). This rules out things like wordpress.com and blogger, where you don’t have any access to the html. (you can still stick in some javascript if you are sneaky, but not in the way measuremap requires)
Heavy use of flash. I usually surf the net with flash disabled.
It looks like you can only monitor a single blog per email address. This makes it hard for me as I also write on Feather, a open source marketing blog.
I can’t see the bots. I like to see how often google, yahoo, and MSN hit my site.
Link path tracking, or even average number of stories read per visitor is not there.
Overall it looks very nice, I like the way it focuses on posts, not pages. I think they need to fix up the default install to make it easier for non-techies. I don’t expect them to write a plugin for Typo, but one for wordpress would be nice.
I’ll leave it up for a month, and see how often I actually use it, compared to my tried and trusted awstats.