For the last few months I’ve been getting more and more interested in website statistics program. While one of my clients uses the excellent Mint it’s not the right answer for everyone. For instance, it doesn’t handle storing multiple sets of stats for diffeent domains in the same database therefore making it useless for the Wiblog system.
So, last January, I did what I usually do in these situations and ‘rolled my own’. So part of the new Wiblog system is a pretty tasty stats package that shows you not just the usual stuff (number of visitors by day, wekk, month, favourite pages, number of comments per month etc) but some other interesting stats such as popular search terms that brought people to your Wiblog, and even the ability to follow a particular users travels around your Wiblog.
But that’s not enough for me. Oh nosirree. I want to offer the power of usable statistics to my clients. So I’m developing a centralised statistics server that will gather data from all the websites I work on, and send regular reports.
The problem is that Javascript, which is the technology I use to do this cross-site stuff, has limits on how you can share data between different sites. While there are some solutions for these security limitations they aren’t quite ehat I’m looking for. So, again, I’m rolling my own. I’ll post the answer here when I’ve finalised it. In the meantime if anyone else has his the cross-site XMLHTTPRequest problem (you’ll know what it means if you’re geeky like me) then please add a comment with details of how you fixed it.