Open source web analytics: piwik

Here’s an interesting alternative to Google Analytics…has anyone tried piwik yet? Features include:

• A customizable dashboard showing traffic, viewing patterns, and referrer details.
• Ability to show traffic patterns over time (so you can see if there was uptake related to your releases) and how numbers are looking over the last year.
• Embeddable widgets and APIs to provide access to your piwik data.

Here’s the high level messaging….

Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and so much more.

Piwik is a PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own webserver. At the end of the five minute installation process you will be given a JavaScript tag. Simply copy and paste this tag on websites you wish to track (or use an existing plugin to do it automatically for you).

Obviously it isn’t as powerful (yet) as Google Analytics, I like that you can customize the interface and that it has a Drupal plugin. However SourceForge thinks it’s stable enough to offer as a hosted solution.

Create your own social network sites

Ning (http://www.ning.com/)

Ning is great for those without alot of technical knowledge and who don’t want to host anything on their own hardware. It takes seconds to set up a site (I made one here for fun http://mitwebpub.ning.com/) and you can choose from a number of design templates available.

What makes your own social network on Ning special? It’s yours. Your brand and visual design. Your choice of public or private. Your very own members.

Free features include inserting your own brand, member management, your choice of custom text and widgets, rss feeds in and out, discussion forum, video feature and branded video players, chat room, facebook integration, groups, member blogs, and an events calendar.

Premium services are for fee, and include things like controlling ads, removing the Ning promotion, transferring your own domain name, more storage and more bandwidth.

Elgg (http://www.elgg.org/)

Elgg is an open, flexible social networking engine, designed to run at the heart of any socially-aware application. Building on Elgg is easy, and because the engine handles common web application and social functionality for you, you can concentrate on developing your idea.

Elgg is open source. That means, when you use Elgg, you have the benefit of being part of a large developer community, with the security and stability that hundreds of eyes can provide. It’s also headed and used by Curverider and its partners, so you can be assured that it’s in commercial use and will cope with the demands of a popular application. 

It runs on Apache, PHP and MySQL – the same open source platform that the majority of web applications are written in. Elgg is compatible with enterprise technologies like the Zend Platform and any server environment that can run the Apache web server.

We believe in an open, distributed, social web. As a result, Elgg supports technologies like OpenDD, OpenID and OpenSocial, and we are directly involved in community efforts to push the envelope when it comes to data portability, federation and the user experience. Elgg is a great way to future-proof your social applications.

Elgg was founded by Ben Werdmuller and David Tosh, and has been powering networks since 2004.

Drupal “Code Sprint” at MIT this Friday

The Drupal Association is hosting an all day code and documentation sprint at MIT on Friday March 7. There will be a Drupal booth in Stata on Friday and Drupal core developers’ available to talk to. This sounds like fun, all you Drupal junkies should come!

A code sprint is a gathering of a bunch of programmers to complete a short, rapid development project. It allows developers from different countries and companies to work together and learn from each other. Most importantly, it’s a fun event where we can make some impressive advances for Drupal.

We’re all meeting in a big room, where we’ll code and talk smack until we get kicked out. Come chat with long-time Drupalers to learn from their experience.

The Stata Center
32 Vasser St.
Cambridge, MA 02139

10am – 1pm Room 32-155
1pm – 3pm Room 32-141
3pm – 7pm+ Room 32-155 (we’ll stay until building close)

All rooms are on the first floor. Just wander around and you’ll find them.

Why is my web page slow?

There’s another great Firefox extension to help web designers/developers take charge of how long it takes web pages to load. From the Yahoo! Developer Network comes an open source utility called YSlow:

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool. YSlow gives you:

• Performance report card
• HTTP/HTML summary
• List of components in the page
• Tools including JSLint

Thanks to Wilson D’Souza from IS&T’s ISDA for this post idea!