Mission Penguin

I was looking for a replacement to BBClone touted as "A PHP based Web Counter on Steroids." We've been using BBClone for about 18 months now, and it's worked very well for our small corporate website.

It does your basic reporting, it shows basic client information including IP address, (resolved to a hostname) country of origin, Operating System, Browser, and on and on. Yawn.

Even though BBClone is a PHP based website tracker, the site to be tracked does not have to contain, or even support PHP. This was the selling point for us as our web host did not offer PHP. To pull this off you only need to throw in an "<img src>" tag and point it to a PHP file sitting on your other, PHP enabled, web server. When the PHP file gets "touched" it logs the users info.

The downside to this is that every page you want to track has to have a PHP file sitting on your other PHP enabled server. This is tedious when you have more than a few dozen pages. Also, BBClone does not store information in a database, this has obvious drawbacks.

We now have a web host that offers PHP and MySQL support, so our website tracking can finally have some beef. I ran across a web site counter/tracking tool that is not only built around PHP, but also logs information into MySQL, phpMyVisites.

This darn thing is soooo sexy. It has an excellent web based (PHP) install tool and very polished front end. It offers automated daily emailing of a PDF file to any number of users that summarizes all of the available reports. There's a ton of information available, but it is offered up in a clean, well organized manner.

The next version will offer heatmaps, currently available in beta if you're feeling adventurous. If you're not familiar with heatmaps, imagine Predator staring at your website through his hazy heat signature vision. No amount of mud will hide you from seeing exactly were people click on your website.

That's right, not just what link, but where physically on the site people tend to click. That is so sexy, I want phpMyVisites to have my babies.