March 5, 2002
Or at any rate, that we thought we used. For several months we used their free service without significant problems. Then we signed up for their pay service—for $5 a month, supposedly, you get a single account within which to view and compare traffic for a bunch of different pages within your site, and you’re not required to link to a stall-prone image off your public page.
That appeared to work fine for a month or two. Then I noticed that they’d suddenly stopped tracking Teresa’s blog Making Light altogether—they were recording zero hits, day after day.
I also noticed that there seems to be absolutely no way to change or add to the subsidiary URLs being tracked. You can change the root site URL, but I can’t seem to (for instance) tell it to start tracking Electrolite’s new URL rather than its old one.
Moreover, several weeks of repeated inquiries have revealed that they don’t answer their email. On the bright side, they’ve also never charged us the $5 per month that we agreed to pay. I figure we got maybe two months of the sort of service they promised, so I’ll be happy to pay them $10 if they can ever be bothered to respond.
Meanwhile, what are some comparable tracking-and-counting services? I’m not looking for anything fancy, just an easily-glanced-at-and-assimilated presentation of unique visitors day-by-day, referring sites, search queries, and so forth. Free is good, but (obviously) I’m willing to pay a little for certain kinds of added reliability and convenience. [08:38 AM]
If Panix give you access to your Apache log files, you can analyze them to derive this information without using a third-party service. I use Analog (http://www.analog.cx/) for plokta.com.
Analog looks good, but can it read log files directly off my Panix server, or would I have to download them and feed them in locally?aaI'll probably give this a try, but what I'm looking for is something that would allow me to glance at and make sense of my stats (including lists of my most recent readers, and their referring sites) from a bunch of different machines, at home and at work. Keeping in mind that our pages themselves are hosted on a remote site, albeit one to which we have shell access.
I can recommend the Wunder Counter (www.wundercounter.com), which has both free and low-cost ($4.75/month) options. I've had the free service for over a year now, and they've always been responsive to queries.
If you have shell access, you should be able to run Analog on the server and have it generate an HTML page containing your stats, without downloading any logs at all.
Well, I tried Wunder Counter, and although it seems like a reasonable and well-documented service, my problem is that the "invisible" counter isn't. It adds quite visible blank lines es wherever I put it, throwing my layout off.aaI suppose I could always stash it down at the bottom of the right-hand column, but they make a big point of telling you to put it high up for the most reliable counts. The "Extreme Tracking" people did that too. I don't know whether it's BS or not.aaI'll try setting up Analog tonight. (String of John W. Campbell jokes deleted. Cor chase my Aunt Fanny round the psionics laboratory.)
Something else occurs to me. Panix have a reputation for being pretty clued-up and providing a good range of useful tools for shell accounts. They may already have a log analysis program sitting in a directory somewhere just waiting for you to run it.
Something else occurs to me. Panix have a reputation for being pretty clued-up and providing a good range of useful tools for shell accounts. They may already have a log analysis program sitting in a directory somewhere just waiting for you to run it.
Just a quick note -- Analog is nice, but Webalizer is significantly snazzier with nice day-by-day graphs and other useful stuff.dd
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My method is to grep the relevant bits of the ISP's log into a local file then run Webalizer on it. You could have a cron job run a bash script to do it daily or weekly or whatever.dd
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-Laurel
Panix does have log-analyzer stuff available to shell users (including Webalizer).aahttp://www.panix.com/web/faq/logs/ has more details.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
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