There seems to be a worldwide conspiracy amongst vendors of this type of software – where you can analyse the log files which record who visited your site.
The software is either free (which also means that it has to be impossibly complicated to install and set up unless you wrote it in the first place), or you pay for it (which means having to rob a large bank in order to afford a version which comes even close to meeting some of your basic requirements).
I discovered this over the last two days. WordPress’s stats plugin started playing up, and I was confronted with a never-changing bar graph which showed absolutely meaningless data. So I began looking for something a bit more advanced. I started with the free stuff, like you do. I managed to find one or two open-source programs which didn’t involve downloading the source code, compiling it, and deploying it yourself (a lot of open-source stuff is extremely experimental). I managed to get some of them working, only to discover the authors appear to have a bar chart fixation (and a crap bar chart fixation, at that). Why is it that open-source programmers usually have absolutely no concept of neat appearance or ease-of-use? You inevitably have to install some obscure patch (or Java – and wade through the 3 million variants it exists as to get the right one, usually an older version because the open-source you are trying to use won’t run on the current version), and then find out it won’t work anyway!
After trialling a couple of free ones I quickly discovered their limitations. Probably the main one is that the log files my host provides contain the hits for all the sites I host on my webspace, and these freebies just take the whole file and process it without any filtering.
So I switched my attention to the ones you have to pay for. The cheapest one I found was about $70 – and that is not cheap at all, when you consider you can get fully-functional video authoring suites (for example) for less than half that price. But they nearly all exist in various versions: beginner, business, pro, and so on, and the one that has the features you might need is always one of the top-end versions – and the price now leaps to at least $150 and sometimes as much as £2,000
If you’re going to spend anything like this kind of money you want to try the software first, right? So with one of them I did. Everything was going perfectly smoothly right up to the not-so-insignificant part where I tried to run the 30-day trial for the first time:
You have altered your system clock to try and circumvent copy-protection. Blah, blah, blah!
No I bloody haven’t. I have just installed the program and run it for the first time and this message came up less than 5 seconds later. So have a word with Mr Uninstaller, and enjoy your duel with the Recession.
I did discover that many of these Commercial Thugs provide a ‘lite’ version (i.e. free), but I also discovered that the lite version is invariably totally useless – like buying a car, and finding out the free ‘lite’ model doesn’t come with an engine or wheels. Or a chassis. And maybe not even paint.
I installed a few others and got nowhere. Some simply wouldn’t run. Others were utter rubbish. In fact, I was unable to trial a single one that appeared to come even close to what I wanted – and they expect me to pay $150+ for this? Think again.
Anyway, WordPress seems to have sorted out the prolonged outage that it didn’t tell me about, so I can stick with that for a while longer. I suppose it did tell people somewhere or other. But unless you are more interested in talking about WordPress than actually using it I guess you’d miss it.