2005/06/26 visitors web log analyzer

http://www.hping.org/visitors is a nice little weblog analyzer. It's written in C, requires no unusual libraries or other modules that you'd have to go hunt down, and should compile just about anywhere with a simple "make". I LIKE that kind of code. It's a refreshing change from the prevalent "requires Sam Foo's extrauselesscrap.lib and Linux 2.4 only".

If you let it run amok and output everything it can, you get all of these:

Unique visitors in each day
Unique visitors in each month
Unique visitors from Google in each day
Unique visitors from Google in each month
Pageviews per visit
Weekday-Hour combined map
Month-Day combined map
Requested pages
Requested images and CSS
Referers
Referers by first time
Robots and web spiders
User agents
Operating Systems
Browsers
404 Errors
Domains
Googled pages
Google Keyphrases
Google Keyphrases by first time
Web trails
Weekday distribution
Hours distribution
 

Notice that visitors is Google aware and has several Google specific reports. You can see a sample of this at vreport.html

I disagree slightly with its counting of uniques visitors per month. I consider a visit unique only if the same IP has not already been seen this month. This code considers a visit unique if the User-Agent (your browser) or the day has changed. So if you come here on Friday with Firefox, and then again on Saturday, then later on Saturday with IE, it counts that as three unique visitors, whereas I count it as one. Therefor my stats will be significantly different than those produced by this. That's OK; we just look at it differently.

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