March 4, 2007

Stats Junky

I confess, I am a stats junky. I constantly check our sites, looking for trends in viewership; what platforms, browsers, plug-in / plug-in versions, screen-res and the like are people using when they visit?

If you, too, have the stats jones, happen to have a Google Analytics account over which you want to focus your obsession and are running OS X.4 (aka Tiger), head on over to Rob Scriva's Dashalytic's site and download his free Dashalytics Dashboard widget. Your fix could be just an f12 press away.

Dashalytics screen grab

After configuring Dashalytics with your site url, Google Analytics username and password, the widget will check your Analytics account every five minutes, returning numbers and graphs displayed in daily, weekly, and yearly periods. You can toggle between page views and visits, and periods can be expanded to show the entire range with the peak interval highlighted.

Need to monitor more than one site? Simply drag another Dashalytics widget onto your Dashboard.

If you have a Google Adsense account, there's a widget for that, too. Widsense taps into your Adsense account to return the last three days and month's impressions, click-throughs and revenue for those time periods.

Sadly, Widsense's author has discontinued development and his website download links point to the wrong files at the moment -- however, I gather a Japanese developer named Chi may keep the project going, at least, it appears he has patched the most recent version to work around some Adsense changes that busted previous versions. Chi's version can be found on: χ square::Widsense.

Posted by Lewis Francis at March 4, 2007 5:19 PM
Comments

FYI, Widsense just got busted today or yesterday (I can't recall when it finally stop working properly) so I went on googling spree to find update to this wonderful widget and noticed your blog entry and I had grabbed a version from X square but Chi hasn't updated it yet. however upon searching for alternative widget on Apple's widget page turned up one that is awesome and working is called "RevunSense" at;
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/business/revenusense.html
(Although there are other widgets that gather adsense info but they all broke or died)
Thanks for information on Dashalytics! I was looking for something like that.

Cheers!

Posted by: boult at March 14, 2007 5:20 PM

Thanks for the comment and tip, RevenueSense looks pretty neat. I especially appreciate the ability to set the update interval; Widsense appeared to update every time the Dashboard is invoked.

Did you update to OS X.4.9 yesterday as I did? Wonder if that broke Widsense -- it seems to no longer be able to issue requests...

Posted by: Lewis Francis at March 14, 2007 8:43 PM

No the latest Tiger update didn't break Widsense, it was Google that made the change. Apparently Google Adsense made changes again today which made Widsense load differently than yesterday but still broken.
and FYI RevenuSense just got updated today due to some change. Chi updated his blog regarding Widsense today and said will update it when he can. so check his blog. I think Chi found out about RevenuSense just recently which is why he mentioned that.

just click the link in back of Revenusense to check for update and get the latest version. cheers!

Posted by: boult at March 15, 2007 5:42 PM

Wow, what a moving target -- thanks again!

Posted by: Lewis Francis at March 15, 2007 6:47 PM

As of yesterday, Dashalytics is busted, no doubt to Google changing something that breaks the scrape. Sadly, the author is on holiday until October, so we'll need to be a bit patient.

Posted by: Lewis Francis at September 14, 2007 12:12 AM

Rob Scriva's most excellent Dashalytics is working again -- go get it!

Posted by: Lewis Francis at November 5, 2007 8:12 PM
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://informationgift.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/118

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference 'Stats Junky' from Information Gift.
Post a comment









Remember personal info?


Voigt-Kampf verification (needed to reduce spam):