This morning I was happy to remove our google analytics code from the headers of all our sites, in favor of the excellent, multi-domain and free stats program, FireStats. It became obvious yesterday that google analytics simply isn’t very good. With our article reaching out to over 8,000 people (confirmed via server-side stats) we had analytics telling us numbers from 6k right up to 15k. Not only that, but these incorrect numbers took until 4am today to update. And so, the advantages of FireStats:

1. It’s free. And self hosted. The only other decent self-hosted solution is Shaun Inmans Mint, which is great, unless you need it for many domains, when it becomes expensive.
2. It’s live. If you want the stats from three seconds ago, that’s fine, go ahead and check FireStats, because it’ll have them all lined up for you.
3. It’s more accurate. It doesn’t rely on javascript like google analytics, it uses pure php. This means any browsers visiting with javascript disabled are also counted.
4. It’s simple. I find google analytics overly-complicated. I’m not bothered with 90% of the panel. FireStats highlights whats important to me and thats the way I like it.
5. Lastly, it’s quick. Sometimes I notice a page taking forever to load, and I look to the status bar and all it says is “waiting for analytics.google.com”. Firestats has none of that, since it’s self-hosted.

So if your looking for an excellent stats program, with automatic integration into WordPress and a whole other bunch of CMS’s, check out FireStats.

SQL Buddy is a new way to manage SQL Databases from the web. They are basically trying to improve upon the current solution for managing SQL databases from the web, PHPMyAdmin. The goal of SQL Buddy is to be easy to use and install, and look pretty while doing it.

poMMo is versatile mass mailing software. It can be used to add a mailing list to your Web site or to organize stand alone mailings. Unique Features such as the ability to mail subsets of your subscribers set it apart from alternatives. poMMo is written in PHP and freely provided under the GPL.

Download | Demo | Screenshots