[blog...]

This week I started using Piwik - an open source web analytic tool on some of my websites. And I am really impressed!

I've never used Google Analytics because I find it a stupid and dangerous idea to send data of my visitors to external servers somewhere in the world. I like Google but this idea seems to me quite strange.

A web analytic tool knows more of the visitors as a pure apache webalyzer may know. Cookies and fancy Javascript do the job.

Of course there are some alternative OpenSource projects. But I always thought, that you need your own server for tools like this. But no! Piwik runs with a MySQL database and needs only PHP. So basics, every hoster offers. So I installed Piwik on my shared hosting account and the user data will stay on my sites.

Now, It's easier for me to get overview of the different websites I have online. I see browser versions the visitors are looking on my site even with the screen resolution. A nice world map shows the users around the globe and much more.

I activated the AnoymizeIP plugin. So the visitor IP address is truncated before writing it to the database. And If you really don't like to get tracked: Just disable the tracking on the imprint page!