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FWTLogstat1 UpdateVersion 1.4 of the popular program FWTLogstat1 presents several enhancements, but here only two of them will be discussed: the new command line parameter "-d", and the new report layout that permits a better understanding of the information.
Command line parameterThose people that prefer to have their logs with dates in the American format, which puts the months before the days, can achieve this by modifying the supplied Perl script, and taking care of saving the modified file using the Unix format. This line: $ftdate = "$ftday-$ftmonth-$ftyear"; must be changed to this one: $ftdate = "$ftmonth-$ftday-$ftyear"; The program FWTLogstat1 will not function with the logs produced after doing this change, because it expects the dates in the European format. To avoid this impediment, you must modify the date format using the "Options" menu, each time you run the program. A better approach is to create a shortcut to start the program with the parameter "-d". Let us suppose the program was installed in the directory "C:\Program Files\FWTLogstats". Right click the shortcut for FWTLogstat1, and select "Properties". In the "Command" box, type the following, including the double quotes. "C:\Program Files\FWTLogstats\logstat1.exe -d"
Report discussionThe different report sections will be discussed using as a sample a small log file of only twenty lines. The first section of the report gives some summary information. The raw number of hits, related with the number of days, gives an idea of the site's popularity. The number of users and visits tells you if the site is visited mostly by new users, or by reiterative ones. The four averages displayed give you an at-a-glance estimation of the functioning of the site, telling how many pages are viewed, how many pages one user views, how many visits are you having, and whether users are coming back or not.
The second section is "Day ranking", where you have two rankings of the days covered by the log. The first ranking shows how many hits (page views) occurred for each day. Take into consideration that the first and last days may not be fully included in the log, and therefore will show smaller figures than the other days. The second ranking shows the number of users for each day.
The third section of the report relates to users and their visits. A user, who is distinguished by the cookie with his "user-ID", may make more than one visit, and may view more than one page. The first ranking shows the number of users with a certain number of page views, in descending order. You can see that there was one user with nine hits, one user with six hits, two users with two hits, and one user with just one hit. From the ranking by visits, you can see that you had five visitors, of which two made one visit, and three made two visits.
The fourth section is the "Page ranking". You can see the number of page views for each page, in descending order.
The fifth section is the "Referrer ranking". You can see the number of times that a page sent the user to another page, also in descending order. External references are included in this list, so that you can see that Amazon, Yahoo, and Google sent each one two visitors to you site. The referrer "Direct Hit" may be a user typing the URL of your site on his browser, but most commonly relates to a user that has that URL among his "Favorites" or "Bookmarks", or to a user that is using some scheme to disguise his wanderings on the Internet.
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