I’ve been meaning to write a post about being a freelance web developer and paying income tax. Thankfully, Matthew Haughey wrote a nice piece today on his site, fortuitous, about his trials and tribulations in finding a decent accountant that understood what he does for a living.
His best advice comes near the end:
If you’ve ever run your own business or been a freelancer, you know the pain of scrambling to pay an unexpectedly large tax bill. Be aggressive with the amounts you pay on your quarterly payment schedule and you’ll spare yourself a lot of pain down the line.
For those that don’t know, Mr. Haughey is the man behind the ginormous sites MetaFilter and PVRBlog.
This is my third and final post in a short three-part series entitled “Watching Your Traffic” that focuses on stat tracking software. The first two posts were about Shaun Inman’s Mint and Stephen Wettone’s SlimStat. Today I’ll wrap this up with a look at Google Analytics.
In March of 2005, Google bought the web analytics company Urchin. At the time Urchin was a realitively expensive but extremely powerful piece of software for tracking web site traffic. Eventually, Google renamed Urchin to Google Analytics and released it to the public for free.
My initial reaction to that first version of Google Analytics was stunned belief that anyone would have spent so much money on such a disorganized mess. The more you used it the more you understood just how much information they were hiding underneath one of the worst user interfaces of all time. At the time, Analytics was so hard to use I just didn’t see it as a viable solution for most of my clients and I moved on to Mint
and SlimStat.
Thankfully, Google realized the mess Analytics was and released a brand new interface for it this year. Now Google Analytics is the King of Kings when it comes to traffic monitoring software. The same depth of information from the days of Urchin are still there but now it’s presented in an easier to use interface that all of my clients can navigate.
Of the three solutions I’ve covered in this series, I would say Analytics is the “must have” of the bunch. While Analytics doesn’t offer real-time stats like the other two, it does beat SlimStat on presentation and Mint on price.
This is my second post in a short three-part series entitled “Watching Your Traffic” that focuses on stat tracking software. The first post was about Shaun Inman’s Mint. Today I’m going to briefly discuss a free alternative to Mint that’s actually based on code from Mint’s predecessor.
Once upon a time, Shaun Inman released a free stat tracker called ShortStat. He eventually moved on to create a bigger and better commercial version of the program called Mint and development on ShortStat stalled. Along came programmer and designer Stephen Wettone to the rescue. He took the ShortStat codebase and heavily modified it to allow for more detailed analysis of your traffic.
One of the only major similarities SlimStat shares with the original ShortStat is its price: free. When I’m first starting a new site, SlimStat is the very first traffic analysis tool I install. You can’t beat the price and it has just enough features to give you a good handle on your site’s traffic patterns.
I have two complaints about SlimStat which prevent me from using it as my sole means of monitoring site traffic. First, development on SlimStat has stalled. Wettone hasn’t issued any new releases in well over a year. My other problem is SlimStat’s reliance on using a PHP include to track the hits which sometimes results in bogus hits from spiders and robots. That’s a problem Mint doesn’t have thanks to its use of JavaScript to track hits. These two problems cause me to see SlimStat is a first step solution towards proper traffic monitoring but certainly not a long term solution.
Since I originally started doing client work near the end of 2003, I’ve gone through scores of traffic analysis programs. It wasn’t until the last six months that I finally settled on three separate pieces of software for all my site traffic needs: Mint, SlimStat and Google Analytics. I’ll start with a write up of Mint, but look for more on SlimStat and Google Analytics in the near future.
Mint, written and maintained by Shaun Inman, is the only stats package I use that has any costs associated with it. It sells for $30 per domain and requires PHP and MySQL. Let me tell you right now, Mint is worth every penny for its level of accuracy and incredibly attractive interface.
All of the data Mint collects is available in real-time to you. This leads to a borderline obsession with constantly tracking and watching your site’s traffic throughout the day. Mint uses JavaScript to track visitors instead of the more traditional means of crawling server logs. This eliminates “false” hits from robots and spiders crawling your site. It also eliminates “true” hits from web browsers with JavaScript turned off but I feel this trade off is worth it in the long haul.
Along with the web-based interface, Mint has desktop widgets to help you track your site’s visitors. The last major selling point for Mint is its open API that allows third-party developers to write plugins that expand on Mint’s core functionality and give you even more useful ways to scour your traffic data.
I can’t recommend Mint to you enough. It’s especially useful you’re looking for a solution to traffic analysis that really lets you keep tabs on the pulse of your site. Its real-time tracking can’t be beaten.
In my next installment in this series, I’ll tell you about SlimStat which is a modified version of an older (and free) stat tracker that was originally created by… guess who? Shaun Inman.
This use of third-party tools not only saved them money but it also saved us all the time of going through video conversion which I can tell you from experience is a hassle.
