A few weeks ago, since I felt like the available tools don’t really do it for me, I suggested I might develop my own traffic analyzer. I’ve been working slowly but steadily since then and have created something I’ve now titled “Stats++.”

Basically, what I discovered is that the most commonly-available tools such as awstats and Webalizer weren’t capable of answering the questions I have in a dynamic-page world. For example, unless I’m serving static html pages those tools can’t tell me things like:

1. Which postings are people reading?
   It’s a lot of work to write an article and while I do it primarily for my own enjoyment, I’d still like to prioritize which drafts get attention based on estimates of which articles people find the most interesting.
2. Which links bring people in?
   Most of my traffic comes when I link to sites with lots of readers, like BoingBoing or Bruce Schneier’s Weblog. If I’m building a readership, then I probably want to write on the topics which bring in not only the most readers, but the most readers who then return. Thus:

3. Which articles do people return to?
   If I write an article that that produces a significant amount of return traffic, then I must have done something right the first time. This gives me a chance to look and see.

4. Which articles do people mostly look at and never come back?

I’m now getting pretty close to initial release. I’m pretty much feature-complete with a tool that can answer those questions pretty well. I don’t have as much time-series data display yet, but that may happen this weekend (I’ve got some serious waiting room time tomorrow which means no Net access procrastinating unless I decide to read a book (currently reading L4yercake, which I highly recommend).

Maybe I’ll even post some sample pages if the mood strikes me.