Joe Majewski

Piwik Open Source Traffic Software

After spending a few days tediously sculpting the new site, I am now officially satisfied with the layout and ready for take off. I found this really neat open source software, called Piwik,  that tracks various statistics about visitors coming to the site. The software was really easy to install on the server, and it is unique in that the data is live, unlike Google Analytics.

If you’re interested in using this free software for your own website, there are a couple of things that I should point out. By default, it updates the database every 10 seconds (it is supposed to be live, after all), and this could get to be very resource demanding if you are using a shared server. To change this, edit the global.ini.php file located in the config folder, and change the time_before_today_archive_considered_outdated variable to the desired number of seconds between updates. I currently have mine set to update every five minutes, which cuts the load thirty-fold.

There is also a bug I found that seemingly occurs every time you change the activated widgets; I’ve noticed that it only happens with certain web browsers. This glitch causes your page to constantly refresh after displaying a JavaScript error. To fix this, simply truncate your piwik_user_dashboard table and the problem should be instantly solved. You will have to do this every time you decide to change the widgets.

Other than that, I haven’t run into any major issues with the software. I made my traffic stats publicly available, so click here if you want to check it out.

Related Articles:

1. Identifying Growth and Popularity on the Internet I’ve decided to gather up a short list of tools that are useful in giving you an idea of how...
2. Aiming For PageRank 1 :: My Insight Into Google’s Algorithm It wasn’t long before many of the pages on this site began being assigned PageRank 0 (PR0), which baffled me...