If you’re keen on tracking all activity on your site and you’d like to have access to those statistics locally, then FireStats might be just what you’ve been looking for. I’ve used the tool for a little over a year now, and I’ve been impressed with it right from the beginning when it was still in beta.

Most of the credit for this awesome little tool goes to Omry Yadan, who has done an outstanding job of maintaining the project. Omry pushes out regular updates, and also does an excellent job of documenting all changes and fixes. The latest stable version of FireStats is 1.3.6, and development is still going strong.More…

Written entirely in PHP, and with plenty of Ajax support wherever possible, FireStats provides all the essentials and a bit more. There are plenty of tracking tools on the Net, but many, like Google Analytics (which I also use) don’t afford the user any privacy protection. Since FireStats resides locally on a users server, you can be assured that no unwanted information will be send to any third party – not that I don’t trust Google, but it’s nice to have complete control over all of your data.

Besides protecting a user’s privacy, FireStats will provide users with all of the following:

• Basic hit statistics, including all hits since installation, and all hits in the last 24 hours.

• Recent pages visited by your traffic.

• Recent referrers.

• Complete breakdown of browsers and operating systems used; all organized very neatly in a number of tree lists.

• IP origin analysis to determine the nationality of visitors.

• List of search engine entries used to arrive at your site.

• The ability to exclude unwanted visitors from the statistics. This can be done by IP, as well as by user-agent.

• The ability to add statistics to the Wordpress sidebar and/or footer.

• Publicize nationality of comment posters.

Another cool thing about FireStats is that it’s not platform specific. As longs as your site is coded in PHP, you’re free to use the standalone version. FireStats will also integrate nicely into any of the following content management systems: Django, Drupal, Gallery2, Gregarius, Joomla, MediaWiki, Trac, and, of course, Wordpress.

Check out the Live Demo.