I'm very much aware of (and use) the classic "web stats" logs such as awstats and webalizer. However, I've noticed that I tend to look at these web statistics for very specific information, and that if I modified the output slightly it could be a lot more useful for me.
Anyway, here are some things I am looking for:
* All-time download counts for certain files. Even when logs get destroyed, I'd like some number kept around.
* Advanced referrer tracking: when new referrers show up, I can easily check those out. It would also let me easily blacklist things like search engines and referrer spammers. Oh, and retaining query strings would be savvy (it kills me when I get a referral from a forum and then have to dig out the link where it came from)
Would I be better off just rolling my own PHP log parser?
Apache Log Parser
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- Ambush Commander
- DevNet Master
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I would take a look at awstats data files. After parsing your logs it stores the data in plain text files. Then those files are turned into HTML for viewing. But if you open those data files they're pretty easy to figure out. The data you're looking for is probably in there. It would be less work to output the data you need to HTML than writing your own parser.