![]() On balance, the output from awstats is an improvement over analog in that it provides some visitor statistics. When it did finish chugging through my data, it produced a pretty decent report. To be fair to awstats, it does document how to do this but the ramp-up time to generating the desired reports is a bit longer than with analog. It took a bit more effort to configure up awstats to first analyse all of my archived weblogs and then parse the most recent one (you can’t throw the whole lot into the config file and let awstats decide which way to read gzipped files versus normal files) – analog takes whatever you throw at it and does the right thing. awstats expects to be run periodically (either as a cgi-bin or from the command-line) and analyse both cached data from previous runs and new data from the latest logfile. The usage model for awstats is a little different to that of analog. This sounded like just the ticket so I went ahead and installed it. This lets you glean information such as how long people are staying on your site, what route they are following through the site and where they exit from the site.Ī quick trawl through Debian’s package list turned up another likely candidate for web log analysis in awstats which sounded like it provides similar functionality to analog and details of unique visitors (this comparison is quite detailed). Some of the current crop of webserver statistic tools give you more detailed information on visitors rather than focusing solely on hits. I guess I hadn’t been keeping an eye on the state of the art in web server statistics analysis and as he said it, I realised it was true. When we were reviewing the statistics afterwards and trying to identify trends, Albert pointed out that it doesn’t provide any information about visitors, focusing rather on hits or pageviews. I fired that up on my 12 months of web data first and it performed as well as usual. Back in the day, it was very fast and produced nice detailed reports which were easily customised. I’ve been using analog on and off for about 10 years to analyse webstats. I’m using the word divine intentionally, sometimes analysing webserver statistics feels a bit like reading tea-leaves (or tasseography to the tea-leaf reading crowd).īeing something of a data packrat, I do of course have a whole year of webserver access logs stored away and ready for analysis. One of the things I’ve been meaning to do for some time is take a look at the statistics for our website and the blog to get an idea of what kind of traffic we’re seeing and maybe divine how to improve the site to attract more of the right kind of traffic (people interested in our services). ![]() Good to see Jim, Albert, Rob and William have kept the blog entries coming. Phew, I was gonna say it’s amazing how fast a month disappears and then I notice that it’s more like 2 months since I posted.
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