Written by Cyril

After nearly 4 years of good and loyal services (sic), our analytics interface based on AWStats has been retired, to be replaced with a brand new one – based on Piwik. It is more powerful, more pleasant and more intuitive, so this new interface is bound to please you.

Before you rush and try it, here are a few important items of information:

• All statistics users signed up in your alwaysdata administration have been reinitialized. As the password hash algorithm in AWStats is not the same as in Piwik, we do not have the choice (since we obviously do not store any password in unencrypted form). Therefore, you will have to go to the alwaysdata administration, in the Statistics section, then reset your user’s password.
• All the history will be gradually imported into Piwik. This means that, for the time being, only 2011 is visible. The import process should take several months for completion: indeed, we have to process several billion requests…
• Theoretically, Piwik has been designed to operate via a Javascript tag put on each HTML page (like Google Analytics). It has been upgraded for it to use the raw logs generated by the HTTP server. Consequently, some information is not available (particularly the browser capabilities: Flash, Java, etc.). Besides, the calculation of the viewed pages is less reliable: we start from the generated hits (including the static files, the downloadable files, etc.) and we exclude some traditional extensions (.css, .js, .png, etc.). According to the type of your site, some URL will be considered as “viewed pages” although they are not, obviously. This is a technical limitation that cannot be overcome.

Several improvements have been already planned in future:

• The capability to segment your statistics per site;
• The update of your statistics will no longer take place everyday but more frequently, probably on an hourly basis;
• The ability to insert the Piwik tag yourself in your pages, in order to obtain even more accurate statistics.

Please, do not hesitate to share your feedback with us about the new interface, particularly if you have comments to make. This will allow us to correct our import script if the need arises (to add extensions that should not be considered as “viewed pages”, for example).