28 September 2005 Wednesday

bbclone + textdrive

i give up. i like bbclone very very much. and i like textdrive also. i’m not sure who’s fault it is more, but it’s been more than three times now that some sort of skip has occurred and i lose my stats. i’ve been able to recover some of the older data sometimes, but invariably lose at least a week’s worth of visitor statistics. it’s happened to Ferrydust and it’s happened to Textpattern Resources, the latter being the more serious of the two problems. They’re on different servers, so it’s never been at the same time.

now, i’ve been away from my computer/the web quite a bit in recent weeks. so i haven’t been checking stats. i took a few seconds just now to check, and that has volumed up into several minutes in which i am writing this post:
this time it’s happened to both sites.. but seemingly different problems.

for Ferrydust, it’s showing no stats until the evening of September 21st. 0. everything prior appears wiped out. yay.

for Textpattern Resources, it’s showing nothing after the 13th of September. 0. nothing’s ever happened/happening after September the 13th. yippee.

side note: another site on the same server as Ferrydust, btw, did not have any skips with its bbclone stats. could be because it’s a much quieter site with at least a fifth the amount of traffic.

i really like bbclone. yes, there’s mint, but i’m rather happily comfortable with my basic bbclone graphs, and more than that, $30 for every site will add up to a bit much. i’m not saying that mint isn’t worth that. i’m saying i can’t see paying that. i’d like to do it for one site, but that leaves the others in the dust. so that really doesn’t help my overall issue. and talk of textstats is definitely exciting and hopeful, but not anywhere near the horizon. my point is, i want bbclone to work reliably. i’m not even sure any of this is bbclone’s fault! i don’t know what’s causing it! it’s like a hiccup in the php. and that seems to be server side.

i’m just about resigned to not keeping any stats whatsoever anymore and just not to care at all.

....after a few seconds of thought, i realize that this REALLY DOESN’T help. not all these sites are for me. Textpattern Resources needs a good stats app (it lost March and April, previously, which were unrecoverable, and i thought that was pretty bad…), and so do at least two others. Ferrydust can do without, cuz i’m the only one who cares. but …there’s just got to be a reasonable solution.

*update: i’m going to turn to StatCounter for now.