AWStats

Today's FamilyFirst pick may be a bit on the nerdy side. If it's too nerdy for you, I apologize.

It's aimed at the millions of you who have your own websites. You want to know how much traffic you're getting, right? And wouldn't it be great to also know where that traffic came from? Did it come from referring links, search engine results, or people typing in your web address directly?

And how much of that traffic consisted of “bots,” programs whose purpose in life is to scan your site. Many bots are beneficial, like the ones search engines use for indexing purposes. Others are run by sleazeballs looking for vulnerabilities in your web forms and such so they can abuse your site for underhanded purposes. It would be nice to know if that was going on, wouldn't it?

Well, you can pay big bucks for programs that will give you that information. But you likely have all that info at your own hands in the form of server logs.

Whether your site is hosted on an Apache server (Yay!) or IIS (Aw. Well, we love you anyway), today's FamilyFirst pick will dig through your log files and give you a beautiful, detailed explanation of your traffic at your website.

Today's FamilyFirst pick is the home page for AWStats. Here's their own description:

AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers.

The price is right, the installation is simple enough that only a slight amount of nerdiness is required, and it's a great program. If you have access to your server logs, you need AWStat.

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/