[Durham] awstats and weblogs

[Richard Mortimer]

On 07/03/2015 21:48, Dougie Nisbet wrote:
> Has anyone had much success with awstats?
I've had some success with it. It can be a bit of a pain to configure
but once that's done it does work pretty well.

>From memory the main thing is to make sure you setup the right LogFormat
setting. Generally one of the examples that comes with awstats is pretty
much correct but I haven't tried things with the servers that I host at MB.

You also need to point it at the right logfiles to get them processed.

> 
> The website www.elvet-striders.org.uk runs on a linux platform hosted by
> Mythic Beasts. I have shell access to the account (not not root access
> naturally).
> 
> I take regular backups and have a local mirror of the apache access
> logs. I thought I'd be able to install awstats and analyse the logs
> copied from Mythic-Beasts but I'm confused about how to configure
> things. I also tried installing awstats directly (in the 'elvet'
> account) on Mythic Beasts but couldn't figure out how to configure it.
> 
> I've also been looking at Google Analytics and statcounter. 
There is also piwik.org an open source alternative to the above. I've
never tried it but it might fit your needs too.

> I'm leaning
> more to statcounter as it seems a bit simpler and not as goal/marketing
> driven as GA. I'm not really interested in selling anything or adwords
> or anything like that. But statcounter wants its code embeded 'in every
> page' - and I'm not quite sure what that means.
I think both GA and statcounter work the same way. You put a bit of
magic javascript on each page that you want to monitor. The javascript
does the magic to allow the user to be tracked on each page.

> Does it mean, every
> directory? Or every html or php file? Some directories don't have an
> index file as they're just a collection of individual html files.
Every html. Basically the JS does a bit of magic to track visits to each
page etc.

> 
> I'm really just looking for some simple webstats - page hits of
> individual pages mostly. I'd be interested in an avenues worth exploring
> that don't involve too much heavy lifting.
awstats will do that quite nicely. Much less privacy invasive.

Richard

> 
> Dougie
> 
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