recursion

I have been doing a little logfile analysis on my web logs (remember when that meant log files, and not blogs?) HTTP access logs to find out where my visitors are coming from and how people are finding my resume.

I've previously used Analog for this and found it to be very difficult to configure. So I looked at a couple new programs.

First, I tried AWStats. It's OK. The beta 6.5 version wouldn't run but the stable 6.4 release was fine. The first run gave me an empty report with no error messages or anything, which was very confusing. After a little tweaking with the config file, I got it to spit out the reports I wanted.

Then I tried Visitors and it is a world of difference. Even though it's a C program, Visitors is much easier to use. There is no config file (just a few simple command line switches) and there are no external dependencies like graphics or CGI programs. Everything on the report is HTML + CSS, included in the file. It doesn't even need to have write access to the disk!

Visitors also has some support for mapping user navigation patterns and outputting this to a list or Graphviz.

I like it. This is log file analysis done right.