Analog: Access Statistics, Web Traffic Analysis
If you run a web site, chances are you get some sort of logged information on how many visitors you get. Usually this will take the form of a set of text logs that tell you how many times a page was requested. If you're lucky, your web host will provide some form of basic transformation on your text logs to provide more detailed information. But what does it really mean? Is a hit a visitor? Why are you getting so many visitors from Virginia USA?
In this tutorial we'll look at raw web logs and what they mean and more importantly, how to run some analysis software on them and how to interpret the statistics in a meaningful way. We'll focus on using the free Analog software for analysis, and detail some common configurations for it.
Overview
So what are these logs?
Every time you use a web browser to visit a web page, the server on which the page is kept will keep a record of what you requested and store this information to help the administrators keep track of which bits of a site are most popular. Most web servers like Apache and Internet Information Server, store this information in the Common Log Format. A simple text format in which each line of the file is a request for a page. Most servers allow you to customise the details, but most use this basic information as it can be reliably obtained. Typically each line will look something like this:
127.0.0.1 - matt [23/Dec/2004:15:34:36 -0700] "GET /item.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 2332
So what does this lot of codes mean?
A man of many talents, Matt has been a web designer, technical editor, and jewellery picker. He is currently on contract for the Birmingham City University, producing pages for research centres.
He has tech-edited a dozen books on web design and development for glasshaus, Apress and Sitepoint.
He likes music with loud guitars and games with obscure rules.
His website can be found at: http://www.eclecticdreams.com
He lives in Birmingham with his girlfriend, Frances, and a horde of spider plants.
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