Serial Box Crime

I’ll bet you didn’t know that the majority of web analytics and stats trackers fail to record a large number of valuable information.  If you are like me then you likely can’t get enough stats about your site.  I love drilling through my web stats to see who comes to my site from where and why.  I say drill because of a new hit tracking site I’ve come across and feel the need to share.

MyTinyStats is an awesome tool for anyone who enjoys learning where their visitors come from.  It is still in beta development so it is not 100% perfect in terms of ease of use and friendlyness that you’d expect from some of the more established services however that does not mean it underperforms.  The main page of MyTinyStats is a list of all sites that currently use it.  All of your web stats are publically available to anyone and everyone.

The unique thing about this site is that you can continue to learn more information about an individual hit by drilling through link on your stats page.  Drilling means just what it says in an electronic sense.   Each time you click a link on your stats page it takes you to a different type of statistic about that visitor such as geographical location, IP address, ISP, which pages they visited etc.  This is instead of using a menu system to display specific details.

The features that make TinyStats stand out from the crowd are as follows:

• TinyStats tracks ALL visitors to your site, not just humans with Javascript enabled.
• The reports are “drillable” via hyperlinks to more reports. You can spend hours drilling into your data, increasing or decreasing the granularity as you see fit.
• Reports are open for all to see, driving traffic back to your website. Web crawlers (Google, Yahoo, etc) absolutely love crawling the the reports.
• TinyStats is a community, not a product. There is an active forum with many excellent ideas being bounced back and forth. The main developer is passionate about TinyStats, and thoroughly enjoys responding to user’s feature requests.

Why not try it yourself.  Here is a live window to my sites statistics.  You can click your way through and test it out.

The great thing about MyTinyStats is that it will also show you every single bot that visits your websit and exactly where they went and what they touched.  On your dashboard each visitor will be labelled as “human”, “search engine”, “hacker” etc.  Different labels for each kind of visitor.

I warn you though you may be surprised at the information you see.  Some of it shocked me at first because of the number of bots that visit my site and how many exploit attempts are made against old applications I used to have installed on my server.  I can see each instance of an email address being harvested or someone try to break into my database.  You can even get street level view with Google maps to see where an IP address is from!

Keep in mind that MyTinyStats is still in beta.  You can visit CookingWithSQL for more information and updates on the development of MyTinyStats.