Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

In less than 90 minutes, reinvigorate.net will start accepting signups for the closed beta soft re-launch of their web site stats system. On the one hand, I don’t obsess too much over my stats. But I do like keeping a finger on the pulse of my site. I want to know if my readership is waxing or waning. I want to know what my most popular posts are. I want to know where my hits are coming from.

So, I’ve used a couple of different stats packages over the last few years. I have analog installed on my web server, and I have a cron job that updates stats for several of my sites, daily. I’ve even used a couple of different WordPress plugins that gather stats. But they store their data in the local database, and I found that over time, their tables grew so large that they impacted the performance of my site due to the database performance hit.

Reinvigorate was an external stats service that I used for a couple of years. I found that its simple traffic graphs, referer tracking, and live traffic monitor fit my needs just fine. But it seemed to be a victim of its own success, as the server would occassional have hiccups, and there were never-changing notices of eventual upgrades posted on their site. Then one day, the admins took the service down, promising that it would be back soon.

Months later, it looks like the promised upgrades are finally coming. If I don’t get chosen for the closed beta, I sure hope that the testing goes quickly. I can’t really put my finger on what it is about their service that I liked so much. But maybe when I get to use the new version I’ll be able to figure it out.