I was thinking about not forking processes to read a file, not to avoid the use of php, if you're comfortable with that.

What ideas do you have about reading the stats? You'll have to use a server side language anyway (or do you plan to read data from a third party service with a restful api?)

edit: if you want to have a zero-install tool I'd suggest to go with python plus bottle (a one file webframework), so that you would be able to clone and use it from any directory.