We just “opened” our analytics with Piwik!

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

You know there are some pages that say “12 users online”; oh well, we go one step further and we expose our full Analytics with Piwik. The reason isn’t to see our traffic, but to check some other cool things like the systems, the browsers, the mobile devices, etc, that people use.

Okay, we haven’t tens of thousands of users as other blogs have, but we hope bigger pages than us to follow our example :)

what is piwik?

Piwik is a free downloadable open source web analytics software. Piwik provides you with detailed reports on your website visitors; the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages, and much more.

Piwik is a free software alternative to Google Analytics already providing real time analytics for more than 320,000 websites!

Piwik Official Page

why piwik?

We are going to keep using our Google Analytics, but Piwik offers the advantage to control our data. Instead of using Analytics API to make our Analytics public available, we deployed a Piwik installation, and we give anonymous access, so everybody can watch it, without registrations or anything else.

is it accurate?

Absolutely no clue! We just set it up! But Google Analytics isn’t accurate at all anyways. So we will compare the data from G. Analytics and Piwik, with the actual data from our server logs to see which is more accurate.

access our analytics

From our page wogue.org

or by direct link wogue.org/piwik

the reason for making this?

The short answer could be: “because some people are just curious”. But there is more than this; you can find popular queries, demographics, hardware and software that people use and much more. All these can help you to make better pages for Linux -8/10 of people here access our page with Linux.

And besides is one more way for us to open/free our data :)

hope you like it!

Ok, it isn’t big deal, but we hope you enjoy our initiative :)

*We are going to test the load of the server, if the load goes too high (8cores, 16G RAM, Dedicated – So I guess it won’t be a problem at all), we will be forced to make registered accounts or shut it down :(

http://funsurf-blog.blogspot.com/ Satyajit Sahoo

Hmm… people still use IE!
http://twitter.com/Aeyoun Daniel Aleksandersen

Isn’t this sort of data usually attempted to be kept secret to please/lure advertisers? Is the site moving to a donation model?

alex285

> “Isn’t this sort of data usually attempted to be kept secret to please/lure advertisers?”
Does adsense policy prohibit to expose analytics?
> “Is the site moving to a donation model?”
Nope!

Tom

> “Does adsense policy prohibit to expose analytics?”

No. It is just common practise.

alex285

Personally I would like to see pages/services to open their analytics, MMORPGs to publish their exact userbases etc.. If I want to see something from others, I should do this first, right?

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