Since I do love information presentation, one thing I've always had fun doing is generating the stats reports for my various sites. After many iterations over the years, the following suits me best - 95% of the use I get out of the system is from the indented referrer lists.
Main Screen

Here you can see a short summary of the activity on all of my sites - next to the site name you can see 'hits in past 24 hours (unique hits in past 24 hours) - total hits'. The important bit is the indented list of referrers - the previous 10 referrers are listed and indented according to how long ago the hit was made. These blocks of text let me see how busy my sites without reading anything onscreen - you can see that bodytag.org is getting a lot more hits than glenmurphy.com because its 'last 10 referrers' is squished to the left. On the right you can see the page that was viewed by that visitor. Controls at the top of the page let me choose whether I want to see referrals from all sites not my own, all sites including mine, or all hits regardless of whether a referral was included (see this in the third image). Note that the indenting stops at about the 12 hour mark (poor riot.com.au).
Details Screen

Viewing the details for a site will show a longer list of referrers, as well as some more traditional bar charts.
'All hits' Details Screen

This just shows what happens when I choose 'view all hits' - you can see what looks like a single user 31 minutes ago clicking on all the menu items.
And that's that. I'm not going to pretend that they're the most user-friendly or immediately comprehensible reports, but they give me all the information I need and are usable even squinting through a hangover.
The main page is a PHP script that takes around 30 seconds to generate - hits are logged into and extracted from MySQL databases (each site has its own), though I suppose I could change it to parse Apache log files. There's also a smaller version that fits into my Windows taskbar as a toolbar.
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