A few months ago I got really interested with the way Mint works, and decided to build my own website statistics tracking software. As you do.
My first demo used Open Flash Charts to pie chart the operating systems and browsers of my visitors, which worked well using a mere PHP generated GIF image to collect information about the visitor.
As the complexity of the demo increased, I turned to JavaScript tracking code, copying the way the Mint tracking code embeds a further piece of JavaScript using a built GET request from the previous JS containing information such as browser, OS, flash version, resolution, page title and referrer. This URL was then sent over to PHP by means of embedding more JavaScript to get the browser to actually send it to the server. Again.
Wow that seemed less complicated and boring in my head.
Anyway, that's the basis of how my statistics site is going to work, but with added stuff such as user accounts, as the site will be a public medium meaning that anyone can sign their site up and start tracking their site and SimpleStatting. No? Argh.
I've stopped work on it for now, but i'm planning to rewrite most of the code to make it slightly human understandable, [I write shitty code] and I'm going to make it so it's scalable. If I were to release it now, the site could easily pull my MySQL database over 1GB, as every single visit is recorded with all of the data taken from that particular visit. A tally type system would be better, with duplicate instances of data being tallied and datestamped instead of simply duplicated.
Aside from my hideous code and method, there's the hosting. I will most definately need to get a slice to host my site, I can see this project being *slightly* more popular than browserstart was/is.
Sick of reading my babble? Haven't read it at all and skipped to the bottom to get the juicy bit? Pah, here's a demo that's been collecting data from my sites for about a week. Most of the graphical pages are broken so expect some open flash chart errors, but most of it is working.
