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I have been using phpopentracker at my old host. Not sure if its geared for mass-loggin, though. The database can get quite large.

pphlogger. Also showing 'follow path'. Very useful.

Urchin looks like a very nice piece of software, but, set out to prove that you can't teach a young dog new tricks, I find myself happy with what I've always used, AWStats. The new version provides some new functionality, but I like it because it's basic. You can set it up to view as a single (long) page that reports the month's visitors, sessions, and hits; broken down by day and hour. It breaks your visitors down by country, gives you your top 10 hosts and robots, average visit duration, top file types, top visited pages, operating systems, browsers, referrers, search keyphrases, errors, and with a bit of included JS, screen sizes and plugin detection.

Urchin can probably do all of that and more, but AWStats is what I know, so I'll probably stick with it. I also like that AWStats can give me up-to-the-minute updates if I choose, so I can see the current day's traffic.

Even with my elementary knowledge of Webmin, I found it pretty easy to set up on TXD.

I've never been fond of webalizer for it's lack of a cross-referencing breakdown of who was actually viewing what. Analog is OK - I've used it before. I've never been able to set up & use AWStats on any prior host, although I've heard very good things about it and the demo is nice. If I had to make a choice it'd probably be AWStats.

Urchin is pretty darn good. I'm a little upset at Firefox's lack of SVG ability, but meh - whaddyagonnado? Urchin's development around IE/MSFT-based tools is a little annoying. Also - it lacks the ability to use permanent filters, or save filters. But all-in-all it seems like a pretty impressive stats tool.

I don't think the perfect stats package actually can exist. I've always found that a combination of two or three tends to be the best. If I ever need to really investigate mysterious stats, I'll just grep the access_log directly.

Hmm - just gives a fatal error & crashes firefox for me. I think it might need a bit more tweaking in some cases.

That was via 0.8 - haven't yet tried on 0.9

DaveSeidel wrote:

Sorry about that! ...I'm on 0.9.1...

Upgraded to Fx 0.9.2 -

It's early days .. but this project looks really interesting:

http://das.reinvigorate.net

spiffin wrote:

It's early days .. but this project looks really interesting:

http://das.reinvigorate.net

The output of DAS is very nice, and it's actually been around for quite a while but development is slow. I have stats from my site going back to late 2002. I used it up until I switched to TextDrive in June. I especially liked the way it did referrers, much better than Urchin does.

It doesn't actually analyze your logs though. You embed some javascript in your html and the client pings DAS which takes care of all the data collection. There are two drawbacks to this, anyone who has turned off javascript, or is using a browser that doesn't support it, won't get captured by DAS. The other drawback is that the system doesn't track which pages people are actually accessing. You can embed that javascript into every page if you want. But if you want to see which pages on your site are the most popular then you are out of luck. DAS lumps everything together in all the reports. And you'd never be able to tell that that 800k pic of the boss drunk at the Christmas party is eating up all your bandwidth :)

-Sam

Last edited by sewm (2004-12-03 04:03:40)

When I moved my site to TextDrive, I started using a new stats program called AudiStat (http://adubus.free.fr/audistat/). It's a very simple PHP/mysql program that tells me who was there, where they went on the site (page by page), how they got there, OS, browser, etc.

All it requires is 1 line of PHP code at the top of each page that you want to track, and voila! you have stats. :)

decided to bump this old thread since it's got most of the alternatives. i'm looking mostly coz urchin is way too slow when it loads. on a per-page basis, it takes way too long. it's also pretty crappily designed for 800x600. there's very little in the left menu, but it's unncessarily wide. i know most ppl think 1024x768 is standard, but seriously...the main area of the page doesn't have so much that the page needs to be so wide.

a good change would be to put everything in one category (traffic, etc.) available on one page...that would compensate for how long it takes. i think in most cases, ppl view more than just bytes transferred or page hits, so putting one on each page doesn't save bandwidth or cpu cycles.

if there was a "light" version or some changes i could make to reduce all the extras, i wouldn't complain.

wrt features, no issues. creating/applying groups could be made a little simpler.

dhdesign wrote:

When I moved my site to TextDrive, I started using a new stats program called AudiStat (http://adubus.free.fr/audistat/). It's a very simple PHP/mysql program that tells me who was there, where they went on the site (page by page), how they got there, OS, browser, etc.

All it requires is 1 line of PHP code at the top of each page that you want to track, and voila! you have stats. :)

phpopentracker works on this basis too which is why i like it. most of the content on my site will be through my scripts so that works just fine. only downside is, that stat collecting does slow things down...if u consider the fact that urchin and awstats use the logs and (in urchin's case, dunno about awstats) is processed just once a day. processing min{1/day, 1/statslogin} would be ideal.

right now, awstats seems to meet my requirements. (details + content). is there anyone who's used both and can give a reason why one might be better than the other. i'm aware ppl enjoy the eye-candy in urchin, but i think it's quite...ugly. that factor aside, anything worth noting in either?

Urchin has some issues on the hosting sides. I have no specifics, but I've seen a couple of hosting company ranting about it and switching to AWStats.

We're logging into dbs, want to do it via spread, and build the stuff worth looking at into textpanel.

jason wrote:

We're logging into dbs, want to do it via spread, and build the stuff worth looking at into textpanel.

Awesome!

aneroid wrote:

i read up on awstats as a webmin module. but i don't see webmin config anywhere, so can't add the module either. so we'll have to wait until it's set up by u guys.

No, you don't need to wait. I installed AWStats in my account here a month or two ago with no problems. I like it much better than Urchin--instead of so many little pages, it puts all the main stats in one big page that I can simply scroll through.

Just follow the instructions in the AWStats distribution and you can be up and running.

Geary wrote:

I like it much better than Urchin--instead of so many little pages, it puts all the main stats in one big page that I can simply scroll through.

precisely why i want to use it. it also loads alot faster. (it = awstats)

aneroid wrote:

i'm looking mostly coz urchin is way too slow when it loads. on a per-page basis, it takes way too long.
...
a good change would be to put everything in one category (traffic, etc.) available on one page...that would compensate for how long it takes. i think in most cases, ppl view more than just bytes transferred or page hits...

@padawan: is 'summary' worth the price tag? after considering the alternatives?