First, some praise … THANK YOU! You folks have put together a fantastic stats package. Have been using GA (The Gorg’s Analytics app) for many years, but have become leary of them and their ‘practices’ over the last year.
Have experimented with a few different stats options and we finally settled on Piwik 1.8.
The installation went smooth as silk - 8 days ago when we first launched our website; we’ve been regularly accessing the stats as myself and my partner suffer from stats OCD (I’ve been involved in SEO/SEM for almost a decade now, and my partner is enjoying learning all about metrics). We love it!
OK, now down to business…
Am fully cognizant of the fact that each time we log in, the reports get generated dynamically. However, the last two days, logging in reminds me of the ‘good ole days’ of dial-up: submit a form, go make coffee, and come back to the last of the dashboard rendering.
We’re running on GoDaddy’s Deluxe shared hosting (and looking at other options as we grow our business). I understand the option available to us would be Web Crons to get the hourly archiving going after having read several FAQs and forum threads including…
How to Set up Auto-Archiving of Your Reports
http://piwik.org/setup-auto-archiving/
Godaddy CronJob & archive.sh
301 Moved Permanently
(** as an aside, why use archive.sh rather than archive.php? Older/legacy implementation? **)
Still having issues
http://forum.piwik.org/read.php?2,82487,82677
etc.
… but I wasn’t able to nail down an answer specific to the following.
Here’s our dilemma with archiving on GoDaddy.
GoDaddy limits what you can do with cron jobs via their web hosting/cron job interface. This includes properly processing calls which include query-strings which always end in error messages being emailed back (past experience on having attempted to do so on a few different occasions). It’s been my experience that, if I create a very simple, one-line php file which runs the url requiring a query string within an include I can bypass, or hack, this limitation.
Here’s my concern - if we do the same w/Piwik and run the following
http://mysite.com/piwik-folder/misc/cron/archive.php?&token_auth=[put-your-token-here]
… in a one line php file using include(), will this have any negative impact or bearing on our stats? Has anyone else attempted to do the same? If so, what do we need to look out for? Is there another suggestion (aside from moving to another hosting platform)?
Rather than impact our stats, corrupt our data or screw up the report archiving, thought I’d seek out some informed, educated answers here.
We can restrain ourselves with respect to logging in and restrict ourselves to accessing stats for the wee hours, but I’d rather get the archiving process via cron job handled ASAP as, happily, our traffic is beginning to increase quite a bit.
Look forward to any and all responses, and, once again, thank you! Great job to all involved!
Once our business begins to really take off, you’ll likely be seeing some proper thank$.
EDIT: another idea just crossed my mind - using a header redirect - ie: header(location: [put-url-here]). Any thoughts on impact/issues?