I’ve been using Google Analytics for quite some time. I do love it. It’s easy, it’s pretty, it’s addicting to look at the charts and graphs. Lately I’ve been trying out an alternative to Google Analytics, Piwik.

I’m not going to list a bunch of bullet points with features of both compared. I am, however, going to tell you my experiences with both. I started with Google Analytics. The setup and install is so easy, a blind ape could do it. Once tracking, the graphs, maps, numbers are all easy to understand. You can compare your site to others like it, and you can set up different segments of visitors and display the graphs according to your segments.

Google Analytics has been fun and easy. I do have some hangups about it. Although there is no cost, Google owns your data. They are giving you a service, you are selling them your data in return. They know about your visitors and can track them based on their interest in various pages of yours. They can do whatever they want with this information. For some people, this is fine. I personally don’t give much of a rat’s ass what Google thinks they know about me. For others, this is a privacy issue.

I also ran into some limitations with Google Analytics. It doesn’t track downloads very easily, and getting any sort of report that it doesn’t already give you is impossible because you only get what you see.

I decided to try Piwik. It’s open source, they advertise themselves as an alternative to GA, and you own all of your data. I threw up a new site on NearlyFreeSpeech.net, installed Piwik (literally a 5 min. install, just as they say), and started playing with it. A lot of the graphs are the same, the dashboard is completely customizable and is not jenky at all. After tracking some sites with it, I’m convinced it’s actually more accurate than Google. It picks up more visitors and keywords from search engines.

So I’ve been using Piwik regularly for about 3 or 4 months. There are some things I miss. Goals in Piwik do not have the awesome funnel that GA does. Not even close. The goals are pretty stupid, honestly, and all the ones I track are done manually through javascript. It’s nice to be able to track them, but it’s something I can get through any of my apps anyway. So from what I’ve noticed, Piwik is missing the funnel view (although they are working on it), and it’s missing an IP filter: half the visits are from me sometimes, and it’d be nice to be able to browse my own apps without having to worry about messing up the analytics.

Aside from those two points, Piwik is the winner for me. I really never actually check Google Analytics anymore. Piwik really has stepped up and provided a service that’s comparable in features to GA, but free as free for me to use it without having to give away info about my awesome users. I would definitely urge anyone who likes Google Analytics to check out Piwik. The best part is, they’re actively developing it and there more and more features to look forward to as new releases come out.

I recently got a WRT54G v3 (an older version of a Linksys router) off of ebay. I specifically got a version 3 because it’s the best router known to man that’s under $300. If you can get one for less than $50, my advice is to take it. Up until a few days ago, it was running the stock Linksys firmware. It’s not terrible but it’s not very extravagant either. We had a power outage and after that, wireless stopped working. I tried many things, including slapping the unit with my balls to make sure this wasn’t some sort of misguided power struggle. Putting it back in its place should fix that. No luck.

I had heard many, many times about the dd-wrt firmware. One of the good things about the WRT53Gv3 is that you can install just about any custom firmware you want onto it. I’d also heard in the past about a firmware called Tomato. It’s supposedly light, lean, fast, and has great QoS (although I never even bother with QoS).

I decided to give it a shot. I’m in love. It gives you all the options you need for the things you’d want, but doesn’t bloat up the interface with extra junk. It’s simply amazing. I really think Linksys should just stop bothering to make their own shitty firmware and just install Tomato on their routers.

Unfortunately, Tomato didn’t fix the wireless problem, so I had to plug in an old nemesis Netgear router I had laying around. It starting, in memory of times past, dropping my connection every 5 minutes. Fine for browsing the interweb, but not for streaming music or “videos.” I decided to give the Linksys one more shot…and it worked! Thank god. The best router ever with the best firmware I’ve seen so far, NOW with wireless. It must have been some strange hardware issue that fixed itself.

To be fair, I’ve never used dd-wrt and therefor can’t give a good comparison between it and Tomato. If I had a few extra routers laying around, I’d try it out…but each firmware flash is a dance with the devil and I can’t afford to get / find another one.

As all of my hundreds of thousands of readers know, I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my girlfriend’s laptop. Aside from the confusingly random names they give Ubuntu releases, I have to say I’m extremely impressed. The basic idea is that if you want a server linux, go with Debian or Slackware…both are extremely stable, highly configurable, and FAST. Slackware is a bit more for advanced users than Debian (not a big deal if you know how to edit config files) and perhaps a tad faster, but both are well-oiled machines ready to handle anything you can throw at them.

If you want a desktop machine, check out Ubuntu. All the things I try expecting it not to work, it just works. For example, I was testing flash on it and the volume was too loud. Just for shits and giggles, I tried the volume buttons on the laptop. Holy shit, it works. Next, I’m installing printer drivers on the VirtualBox XP instance. Well guess what? I plugged in the printer thinking, well thank god I have windows installed because it will autodetect it. Instantly, I see a window popup in Ubuntu telling me that my printer has been installed and is ready for use. Now that’s service.

Now, all of this plug and chug computing surely comes at some sort of performance hit, but who the hell cares if it makes your life easier and you don’t have a production website running on that box that gets 1000 requests/s.

There is the issue of auto-updates. Sure you need to update buggy or hackable software…but ahem, why is it on there in the first place? The reason distros like slack and deb don’t need constant auto-updating is because they choose packages that have been known for a long time to be rock solid. I can’t say I agree with the “constant contact with the update server” methodology that windows instilled in all of us. That’s something you’d never use on a server. If something sucks or has security problems, you hand-update that package and test it a billion times with your software. Once again though, this is a desktop machine, not a server…and the auto update worked pretty damn well.

So while this review is short and sweet, so has my experience been with Ubuntu. Perhaps someday I’ll install it on one of my own laptops and take it for a whirl.

Ubuntu: two thumbs up for the new or casual desktop linux user. Not for server usage. I’m sure there are some servers that use it successfully, but none of mine ever will =).