Those of you who store nightly caches of MrShoe.org for offline reading might have noticed a small addition while running a diff on the HTML. That small difference is a quick JavaScript call to Urchin. Fortunately for poor webmasters like me, Google recently purchased Urchin (and apparently is quickly erasing all traces of Urchin's existence). This is good news because Google now offers Urchin's software as Google Analytics for free, instead of Urchin's $199/month price point. I imagine this move has sparked a fair amount of Google-hating in the burgeoning web analytics market.

Along with using Webalizer on my Apache log files I have now been using Google Analytics for a couple weeks. I want to be up front about this, because I really am tracking every move of the innumerable masses that visit MrShoe.org every day. That's right, my friends in Windsor Park Estate, Singapore, I know who you are, and I know you can't get enough of MrShoe.org.

So far I have been very happy with the information Google Analytics provides and with the slick AJAXy user interface. One caveat is that they are experiencing massive load, which Google claims is the cause of some delays in data publishing. I've also heard that they are currently not allowing new account registration because they cannot keep up with the demand.

All this means that you can no longer peruse MrShoe.org undetected. Big brother is watching, and his name is mrshoe.