Sticking religiously to my can’t someone else do it? philosophy, I switched on Google Analytics yesterday.
Setting up awstats on textdrive was non-trivial (largely due to webmin) , and I’m not that happy with it.
I suppose it’s for ‘trend based’ analysis ( and sites with more than 6 or 7 readers a day 
) but it lacks basic features like a proper daily view, or telling you who clicked on what (or which IPs mod_security is catching).
The Hives offering is based on urchin5 and therefore very purdy indeed (telling SFA that Urchin wasn’t on textdrive anymore was like telling my daughter Santa had died).
Piece of piss to install on typo:
- signup (you probably need a gmail account. they are very good.)
- paste the 4 lines of javascript just before </head> in typo/themes/yourtheme/layouts/default.rhtml
- empty your page cache (so this gets into all your public pages)
- Put some kind of ’WE PROUDLY CONSPIRE WITH THE ILLUMINATI (and google) TO READ YOUR BRAINWAVES’ disclaimer in your sidebar (GA sends info to google, so this is required by the Ts & cs)
As always there are annoyances.
- once you paste the js into your site, google will check you
installed it ok, and say you didn’t. This is a lie (they’ll check after about 6 hours.) - when they’re happy, they say it will take 12 hours. This is a lie (they do it whenever they feel like, gosh)
- it uses Flash to render the reports. My Flash (on Firefox on Etch) can’t handle exotic output like, oh, text. That’s a shame. (think it’s arial – installing msttcorefonts from multiverse on Breezy fixes it. Debian appears to be sulking)
But my god, the piecharts. Such piecharts…