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!