Webmaster is one of the hats I wear, and I guess that if you’re interested in what I write about it may be one of your titles too. I have to keep up on the tools that make the job easier. I found a link on DrasticTactics to a good site statistics crunching application called Funnel Web. Apparently it’s been around for a while and the company - Quest - has released a freeware version (that’s the one I got). It does a great job - a lot better than the simple daily reports included with my web hosting account.


It’s not just about looking at graphs of how many visits different pages are getting, I can also get hints when my site is being abused. I can see if a spammer is hitting my comments page over and over, or I can see if someone’s trying to request a file that’s known to be used in some exploit. One of the best features that Web Funnel offers for this kind of analysis is a Page View History Graph. It shows top-viewed pages and the amount of traffic they’re getting over the duration of the report. So you could take a report that lasts a couple of months and watch for spikes.

A trough in the graph of visits to a page can indicate a different problem. I’ve made some mistakes in the past that result in pages or the entire site being down until I notice it. Even when I do everything right, sometimes the hosting provider screws up. The effect to the visitor is the same either way - they can’t get the page that they want. Funnel Web shows page access errors in the graphs and reports as well. You can see how long a problem went on with a history graph as well. All in all, I’m glad I took the time to try it out.

I did something similar to what’s described at DrasticTactics, I set up a schedule that periodically downloads my logs and runs a report so I can just quickly check on it instead of having to start up the software and wait for a report.

Oh, and if you’re on 1and1 hosting, Jason has a thorough explanation of how to get it working with their special log file format.

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