One of the things I picked up from Jamie and Garrick talking nerd stuff on this episode of the Open Loop podcast was a reference to the open source project Piwik. Despite this thing having millions of downloads, I had never heard of it.
Basically, it is an open source version of Google Analytics that you can self-host. I have it running on this blog now, and it is pretty cool. Even better, via the WP-Piwik plugin, you can see the stats directly on your WordPress dashboard page.
I had a problem where I thought the thing wasn’t working for a while. I saw the stats on my dashboard but not going directly to my Piwik installation. It wasn’t until I dug around that I discovered that I had five entries for this blog, four of which were not receiving stats. Switching it to “Show all sites” then brought in everything I wanted. I am not sure exactly how the other four got created, but that issue is resolved now. It’s a neat little package and fits squarely in my goal lately of bringing more control in house. I like it. Thanks, Jamie and Garrick!
I like it. I need to start putting the other sites into it as well. It is good to have this data and also to have it under my control.
Sorry about the extra websites created, it was a bug in 2.6.1 which was fixed in 2.7.0 now released. See more details here: https://github.com/piwik/piwik/pull/6155
Glad to see you enjoy Piwik!
Glad you are liking Piwik. Beware that if you start sending it a lot of traffic you may need to watch performance. When I had 50 or so sites the all websites tab would get a bit slow. They’ve been working on this in recent versions. If you dedicate even a basic VPS to it you can do a ton though.