Question

The url shortening service I’m building needs to display some basic click stats to users: # of clicks, conversions, referring domains, and country (filterable by a date range). I’ll possibly want more advanced stats in the future.

Is there existing open source software that will allow me to pass events to it and then easily display a bar or line graph of that event (for example, a line graph of “conversions” between two specified dates). It seems like something like this should exist and would be much easier then building the whole thing from scratch.

I know there are graphing scripts, but that still requires me to format the data (usually as an xml file) and then pass it to the graph. I’m looking for something a bit more complete, which I can just feed the events and then it does everything else.

Answer 1

Every kind of software I can image will need you to generate the data you want to plot.

At this point, you have two possibilities:

• Use a third party solution for your stats (such as Google Analytics)
• Use a library to show your data graphically

The first solution will be easy to use, but it won’t be flexible.
The second one will be a bit harder (not too much), but you’ll decide what to plot and how.

I’ve recently started an open source project to make the highcharts plotting easier from php. You might want to have a look to it.