Added support to send integers instead of strings/floats

Added support to send integers instead of strings/floats. This was required for compatibility with statsd servers not accepting floats, such as hekad. I also cleaned up the code a bit to be slightly more PEP8 compliant.
Just the habit of making methods static if no internal variables are used. However, I agree that it's better to leave it an instance method for future sub-classes to override it. I'll revert this particular piece.