The World’s Best Free Software Reviewed

I’m totally obsessed with my web site statistics. I know I shouldn’t be, but I am.

I’ve tried dozens of stats applications over the years, but the one I’ve settled on and have been using for some time is GetClicky.

Hey, good looking!

So, what’s so special about it? For one, it looks gorgeous. That might not seem terribly important for a stats application, but when you spend as much time with it as I do, being kind on the eye is a necessity rather than just eye candy.

When you log in, you get an overview of your account, showing the sites you have the tracking code installed on and their stats for the day:

Useful, as well as pretty

Clicking on one of the sites takes you to the dashboard for that site. This is where it starts to get fun. Sean - the man behind GetClicky - has done a tremendous job of enabling you to see most of what you’re likely to be interested in on a single page. The following two screenshots show the dashboard in all its glory.

You can show, hide and rearrange all of the panels on display. The trend figures can be configured to relate to the previous day, the same day last week, or a 7 day average. You can have bar graphs or line graphs and you can apply filters to the displayed data.

As well as the dashboard, you’ve got tabs across the top where you can drill down to show Visitor data, Actions (an action might be a download, or an exit to another site, as well as a page view), Content (to see your most popular pages), Links (to see where everyone has come from and going to), Searches (who’s using what keywords and search engines to find you) and, the icing on the cake, the tremendously useful and highly addictive Spy, where you can watch your visitors coming and going in real time. Here’s a peak at Spy in action:

Now, you could argue that I should have better things to do than sit and look in real time at who’s coming to my sites, but it does have a real benefit, which I found out yesterday. I was making some pretty major code changes to one of my sites and I suddenly noticed that I’d stopped getting any visitors via Spy. The reason? I’d put a dodgy closing tag in place. Without Spy, I might not have noticed it and almost certainly wouldn’t have noticed it as quickly as I did.

GetClicky comes in quite a few flavours, depending on how much you’d like/are prepared to pay. They have a free offering (hence it being elligible for a review here) and a number of paid accounts. The free account is useful in it’s own right, and is not totally crippled as are some others. You can track up to 3 accounts with the free version, which is pretty reasonable. You’ll have to part with some cash if you want Spy, filtering and a few other features and if you want to track more than 3 sites. There’s a complete list of what you get at the various subscription levels here.

Conclusion

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I use Google Analytics once a week or so, as it’s great for seeing trends over a long period of time, but GetClicky is my Stats package of choice for day-to-day use. It’s always open on a tab somewhere in Firefox. The provided features are genuinely useful, as well as fun. Who’d have ever thought you could have fun with stats?!

As they provide a free package to get you started, you’ve no excuse for not giving it a try. So, get over there now and sign up!

Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of Opera (see my previous review). I was delighted, therefore, to see that Opera 9.5 has been released to the wild.

Since the time of my earlier review, I’ve moved from the world of Windows to the delights of Mac. As a result, I’ve also had the chance to discover Safari (yes, I know it’s available for Windows, but I could never really get on with the fonts). As a result, although I’m still a big fan of Opera, I do find myself using Safari more and more.

Back to Opera. I love the new look. I know a lot of people have complained that it looks too dark, but I love it. On a more practical level, Opera are now using a new version of their browser engine. And it’s fast. Very fast.

All of my old favourite features, such as built-in support for mouse gestures, are still there. The only issue I have (still) is that some sites, in particular some of the Google apps (i.e. Calendar and Docs) still don’t render properly. I use these sites/apps all the time, so this is not good.

I am continuing to use Opera for surfing and if they can manage to get Google Apps working properly, I’d most likely switch back for good.

Head over to opera.com, grab the free download and let me know what you think.

Wow, has it really been 6 months since my last post here?

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