Mar 30 2005

Watching Those Watching Me

Published by gringod at 11:41 pm under GrinGod [dot] Com

I’m sure I posted on this not so long ago but its a subject I enjoy so I’m posting on it again.

I am, it must be said, very vain when it comes to my website. I like to know who is viewing my site, where they’re coming from and what software they’re using. To accomplish this I normally check the log files for my website several times a day.

My web host provides detailed analysis using the AWStats package. Whilst it is a very nice package it doesn’t tell me everything I wish to know. I can’t see which pages an individual user is viewing, or if a user coming from a searc engine then goes on to read other pages (the key to return visits), in order to get this sort of information I need to dive into the raw log files.

Once you get the hang of Apache style log files it is easy to start tracking individual users to see what they’re up to. You can match the log file entries to a specific user but after a while you start to see patterns emerging and sometimes you can spot regulars.

For example, I know that one address (195.226.x.x) is my good friend Phrixus and I’ve noticed that he’s been showing up in my logs as using Firefox on MacOS X. I’ve also noticed one or two visitors to my site that haven’t been around for a while.

Its also possible to track how I’m doing in search rankings. I’ve had quite a few hits for searches on vb.net msgbox and since my first hit on the subject I’ve seen my page rank increasing.

But still I’m not happy with the information I’m able to obtain from this, so I’m forced to take extreme measures. I’m planning on getting phpOpenTracker installed on my site. I have previously used it on the CrashNet website I developed and was very happy with the results. You never know, I might even create a Worpress Plugin.

3 Responses to “Watching Those Watching Me”

  1. # Phrixuson 31 Mar 2005 at 6:49 pm

    How about this http://thedeadone.net/?p=184. Seems like what you are after maybe?!?!

  2. # gringodon 01 Apr 2005 at 9:50 am

    That plugin looks like the sort of thing I need, however, AXS has the following limitations which phpOpenTracker doesn’t:

    What it doesn’t do

    AXS does not analyze your standard web server logs — instead, it builds its own log based on the traffic it detects from the HTML snippets you’ve pasted into your HTML pages. Traffic analyzers that use standard server logs are much more efficient than AXS.

    AXS is pretty inefficient. It is suitable for low-traffic sites receiving a few hundred hits per day (if logs are stored for months), or sites receiving a few thousand hits per day (if logs are stored for days). For high-traffic sites, or for cases where you want to analyze years’ worth of data at once, AXS is not the right tool for the job.

    AXS resides entirely on your server, unlike common remotely-hosted trackers. This means you need to be able to install and maintain a CGI script. You need to be hosted on a CGI-capable web server.

    AXS does not set cookies to track your visitors. Thus, it can only count raw page views — it cannot track unique visitors, repeat visitors, number of pages viewed per visitor, or neat things like that.

    The only downside to phpOpenTracker is that in order to get the best reports I’ll need to be doing some PHP coding of my own… nm. I’ve already done most of the hard work when I wrote CrashNet.

  3. # Phrixuson 01 Apr 2005 at 10:03 am

    I used another app called wp-stattraq for a while that showed everything. Unfortunately it started bloating the db after 6 months of use so I now just rely on the Server logs. Let us know how you get on what you do as I will be interested to see what your solution is.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply