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I like to visualize visitors on my websites, and I was looking for a realtime google analytics alternative some months ago.

Since I also like to do custom calculations or visualizations on some sites, an API for my stats would be quite helpful.

I came across a nice little service called Clicky

It has a free plan which is limited but very usable, and a payed plan that gives you a couple of additional features like API support, Realtime Spying etc.

Some core features:

• API support
• Multiple Sites
• XML and CSV Export
• Trends
• RSS Feed

I think the best way to quickly go through the features of a tool to visualize visitors is to go through it with a couple of screenshots. It’s based on todays statistics of this site, here we go:

Dashboard – a general overview

The dashboard view gives you a basic overview of your site statistics including some nice graphs. You can add additional widgets like embeddable google maps visualization, desktop sidebars, top visitors lists, and wordpress plugins.

Visitors – who visits your site?

The second tab, visitors, shows some very useful information about your visitors. As you can see below the default is a list including origin, browser and platform information and search engine keywords that were used in the query, referrer and user actions (see below).

Additional views provide google maps visualization, recurring visitors and various lists sorted by specific categories.

Actions – what are they doing?

The actions tab gives you an overview of user activity, basically a list of urls a user visits on your page.

Content – which pages are viewed the most?

This tab contains content statistics. Useful to determine the main entrance and exit pages, and then optimize pages that have a low ranking.

Links – who points to my site?

The links tab shows pages that link to your site, and sorts them by visits you get from these sites. Quite useful to see what others write about you :)

Searches – how do visitors get to my site?

It’s quite useful and interesting to see how visitors get to your site. This tab provides statistics about search terms (search engine keywords) visitors are using. A search engine top list is available too, but I guess google dominates on almost every site :)

All these features are available in the free edition, so clicky is a real good google analytics replacement with nice graphs.

Spy

The spy tab is, besides other features, only available in the payed subscription and gives you a real time, ajaxified, list of users visiting your site. Quite funny to watch sometimes :)

I think I really found exactly what I need with clicky, I’m very satisfied.

Check it out, if you need a good website statistics tool.

About 2 years ago I tested various tools for file recovery which seemed quite good, and since I could not recover all the files I wanted, I kept that harddrive.

Today I gave it another try, and came across a tool called ext3undel

ext3undel is a collection of scripts that wrap the steps for recovering files from ext2 and ext3 filesystems into much easier procedures.

It has two basic modes:

• gabi, get all back imedeately
• ralf, recover a lost file

gabi saves you a lot of work: it can be used to recover whole partitions, it uses the recovery tools photorec/testdisk and foremost.

The ralf mode on the other hand uses Sleuthkit to look for specific blocks which are then processed by photorec/testdisk.

Looks like ext3undel is quite handy, still couldn’t find my desired file though :/

Note: If you delete a file with rm or lose your inode table in some other way, files can be recovered because the actual data still exists on the harddisk, you can of course not recover files that have already been overwritten.