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.

SlimStat

http://wettone.com/code/slimstat

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.

Up next, Google Analytics…