Some technology evolves very quickly, for example the following things are used by probably 80% of readers of this page:
- A web browser.
- A mail client.
- A webserver.
But other technology is stuck in the past and only sees laclustre updates and innovations (not that inovation is mandatory or automatically a good thing)
Right now I'm looking at my webserver logs, trying to see who is viewing my sites, where they came from, and what their favourite pie is.
In the free world we have the choice of awstats, webalizer, and visitors (possibly more that I'm unaware of). In the commercial world everybody and their dog uses Google's analytics.
On the face of it a web analysis package is trivial:
- Read in some access.log files.
- Process to some internal database representaqtion.
- Generate static/dynamic HTML output from your intermediate form, optionally including graphs, images, and pie-charts.
If you add javascript-fu to each of your pages you can track page titles, exit links, screen resolutions, and other data to record too. (Though I guess thats a seperate problem; trying to merge that data in with the data you have in your access log without making nasty links like "GET /trackin.gif?x_res=800;y_res=600". Anyway I guess with cookies you could correlate reasonably carefully.)
In conclusion why are my web statistics so dull, boring, and less educational than I desire?
I'd be tempted to experiment, but I suspect this is a problem which has subtle issues I'm overlooking and requires an artistic slant to make pretty.
(ObLink: asql is my semi-solution to logfile analysis.)
ObFilm: Bound
Tags: apache, softawre that should exist, webstats 7 comments