Like most humans, we, web site creators, need to be loved. Of course, we are not talking just about romantic love. We want to know whether anyone cares about what we (or our web sites) have to say, offer or sell. Unless we are willing to wait for an award to find out how much (and how many) people REALLY like us (think Sally Fields at the 1985 Academy Awards), we need a faster way to find out.
Here are four easy approaches. Try them and find the one that works best for you.
1. Introspection
2. Vanity
3. Thinking outside the box
4. Outside, looking in
1. Introspection:
Socrates noted that the unexamined life is not worth living. Introspection and the search of truth are existential virtues. In our context, we seek to learn how much people like us by quantifying web site traffic. We can measure visits to our web site from inside the server, if we own it.
First, let's look at web server logs. Apache has two sets, access logs and error logs. Both require root privileges to view. As root, it is possible to see information about each access attempt. Here is a line from the access log, showing the originating IP, date, time, requested page, browser, and OS.
195.2.114.20 - - [29/Mar/2008:14:20:37 -0600] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 937 "http://forum.words2u.net/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7"
Here is an example of an error log - I get quite a few requests for favicon.ico. I just created it, so there should be less of these errors from now on.
[Mon Mar 31 14:30:24 2008] [error] [client 81.207.89.42] File does not exist: /home/words2u/favicon.ico
This is quite a mouthful, hard to read, analyze or visualize, so I moved to the next option - traffic monitoring software, or log analyzers. I installed webalizer, which gives wonderfully colorful reports on the web. Unfortunately, the data I see is pretty meaningless, or at least it seems so to me - it keeps telling me I had 2 visitors, one from Poland the other from Russia. I guess I should read the manual. I also installed awstats (apt-get install awstat, not hard to do), but could not even tell where to look for the analysis. So, at least for now, this is not really working for me.
There is is a slew of log analysis tools, both free and commercial, which extract information from the log, draw nice graphs, and provide auxiliary information, such as geographic location of the visitor, and so on. The main disadvantage is that someone has to install these programs, then figure out how to use them.
Here is a short list of log analyzers for Linux, thanks to Danny from FLUX:
analog http://www.analog.cx
awstats http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
webalizer http://webalizer.org/
webtrax http://www.multicians.org/thvv/webtrax-help.html
http-analyze http://http-analyze.org/
awffull http://www.stedee.id.au/awffull
sawmill http://www.sawmill.net/ Commercial
summary http://www.summary.net/ Commercial
visitors http://www.hping.org/visitors/
webtrends http://www.webtrends.com/ Commercial
hitbox http://www.hitbox.com/ - now forwarding to another commercial site
If you want to check out progress on my web site, go to my Costa Rica GPS wiki (gps.words2u.net) or blog (blog.words2u.net) - and leave a message on this site, telling me what I am doing right or wrong.
Next time - vanity.
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