Hit Counters & ClustrMaps?

sufi

lala
every few months i have a thrash thru the webserver's logs (= 90MB since September :eek: ), it makes fascinating numbercrunching, endlessly absorbing altho it can be a slog, i still love to find out those top 20 downloads, referrers, visitors' countries, etc etc
who recommends what hit counters and log analysers, please?

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anyway... I signed up for this http://clustrmaps.com/ thinking o that's kinda cute, like:
83.216.135.129-6109--world.jpg

...& yeah it is kinda cool, it seems to hotlink disctretely in the blog and links you up to a more detailed world map,

but, er
can anyone please explain how does it work???


i'm fairly certain that it doesn't have access to the logs :eek:
 

Canada J Soup

Monkey Man
The maps are hosted by ClustrMaps, so their servers are able to monitor and log much of same data that your server does. Anytime a web page contains content from multiple servers (be it a feature like this, an ad or a web bug) each server is privy to the same information about visitors to the page. IP addresses are essentially all about providing locations (since that's how data gets from machine to machine on teh internets), so generating a geographical map just involves looking up the IP to see where it's been assigned.

I shouldn't imagine that the ClustrMaps would have access to any info about downloads from your site, by the way. The only transaction between their servers and your site visitors should be in relation to the map. Granted, all the locational info probably gets fed into a giant marketing database which is in turn somehow used to determine which continent should receive the bulk of that days viagra spam.
 

sufi

lala
i'm not too sure about that mr soup as the image is not held on the same page that the stats are talking about, i think it works even without altering yr html code...?

my fave log analyzer so far mus be analog which builds you a nice webpage with graphs & all :)
 

nomos

Administrator
analog looks lovely but i'm a little confused after looking through their site. is the idea that i would download my log file from my server, wherever it is, and then open it locally with analog running on my computer? or does analog have to be running the computer hosting the site?

i've been wanting a better logging and couting utility for one of my sites but because i have to use url-cloaking and a frameset i've had trouble getting scripts to track stuff properly.
 

Canada J Soup

Monkey Man
sufi said:
i'm not too sure about that mr soup as the image is not held on the same page that the stats are talking about, i think it works even without altering yr html code...?
Generally a counter image that you embed in a site will operate by just showing the stats for itself, which (cause it's essentially part of the page being downloaded...just held on a different server) will be the same stats as for the page. There may be something else going on with ClustrMaps though...things change fast.

No idea how that analog thing gets all the data it does.
 
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