Preamble
Nothing bad just web analytics
Actions taken
Running a blog it is a good idea to see if anyone is actually reading it.
I decided to add some web analytics. On the DS213j there are 3 possible options, if you don’t want to roll your own.
google analytics
Google analytics is probably the easiest to get going and reading the web provides a good interface, but I would rather not add my ecosystem directly into googles arms and would like to support open source projects.
webalizer
This was my preferred choice as it gives good visualisation and pages respond quickly. It works by scraping the web server logs. However since DS213j started supporting different back end web engines it seems to only report the general one. My website is using apache on a separate a separate apache backend web server (on the same box). Thus I can see no usage statistics for this website. I believe it probably is easily configurable but I do not wish to spend the time on this just yet.
Piwik
This appears to be the major player in web statistics and definitely has more penetration than webalizer. It does however work by adding an extra piece of php code to the footer of each webpage to report back that the webpage has been loaded. I feel this is quite intrusive but does appear to be how a lot of the web works. So I have gone with piwit. I will report back later how it is going.
Conclusion
piwik seems to be best choice for web analytics if you don’t want to use googles.