I’ve been working on a service that allows you to embed your statcounter.com bar chart inside your CMS or other parts of your website.

For those of you who don’t know statcounter, they offer a free service, giving you in-depth statistics. They carry a free account that lets you track the last 500 visitors and keep global stats (permanent). I’ve been using them since I have started this website. I also use Google Analytics, but even though the flash charts are nice, it doesn’t compare to the information statcounter gives you.

The ‘service’, if you can call it that at this point, allows you to enter your username and password for your statcounter account, and then the software will login for you, grab the bar charts for all your projects and display them for you under one another. The project name will be listed under each bar chart so you’ll know which stats you are looking at.

Once you’ve logged in, the server keeps the cookies, so you won’t have to keep entering your password (you can just hit get stats again and it will get a fresh copy for as long as the session stays alive). If the session times out, you’ll get a warning telling you your login expired, and you can just enter your account info again to retrieve a new set of charts.

The code works and is up and running right now.

Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think.

UPDATE @ 11-11-2008:

It's been about 9 months since my last update (shame on me), but I'm happy to tell you that the application still works :) In the next few weeks I'll start porting some of the code into workable includes that you can use to show the chart in your own CMS. Any feedback is welcome!

NKCSS StatCounter Bar Chart Beta Service