Just to prove that I’m not a hippy I’m gonna talk more web stuff to keep up geek appearances.

I’ve been a little bit concerned about my webstats being skewed due to all the spammers visiting my website to post dodgy comments. I use a free log analyzer called Webalizer to inform me about how many visits I get a day, how people find my site and what search criteria they use. It seemed to indicate that I get about 350 visits a day but I find that a little surprising. Webalizer works by reading the apache web server log files and creates graphs and lists. It’s really fun to look at the search keywords but the rest of it seemed a little useless and inaccurate.

I remembered that a website I used to work on used to pay for a service that sent statistics using javascript from the actual webpage to an analysis company that made meaningful statistics. Being a frugal type I thought I might try to find a free version of that and came across StatCounter.com. If you don’t have a hugely popular website it’s free but you can pay to upgrade to a professional version. I’ve only been using it for a day and I’m already impressed.

Statcounter can tell you what country and state someone came from, the path they took once they were on the site or the search, what time they were there and whether they used a search engine to get there. I’m most impressed that you can see what screen resolution they had so you can taylor the look of the site to suit the majority. The best part is that a cookie can be placed on your pc so that statcounter doesn’t count if you have visited your own site. I mean, you wrote the damn thing so of course you know how you got there. It’s also good because it means that you don’t need access to the server’s log files to get meaningful information. Plus all the statistics are real time – you don’t have to wait for it to run every day or hour.

Sadly this will probably mean that my 350 visits a day on Webalizer will probably deteriorate to 50, but I’ve had 18 visits since last night so that is cool. It’s all those Jo Beth Taylor porn hunters that bump up my hits. 🙂

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