dasman’s World

No good having a blog if I can’t justify my own sense of importance by seeing just how many people hang on my every word. (You’ll be pleased to know that the count is currently 8 different people )

So, in comes AWStats to analyse my web logs. Its not a bad little package. I’ve used a few tools over the years to do this sort of thing for various clients – Analog and Webalizer come to mind immediately. Of the three, Webalizer was the easiest to install and get things up and running quickly. Analog was very customisable, but lacked a bit of “sizzle”. So far, it seems that AWStats sits between these two – very comprehensive reporting capabilities, and a reasonably nice look. But the cost of that is a bit of a fiddle to get things running.

All in all, though, not too hard. Certainly worth a look, and probably my preference out of the three tools.

Well, after months of procrastination, I’ve finally entered the world of blogging, with WordPress being my initial tool of choice. So far, I’m pretty chuffed – the look is good, and the install was relatively painless.

Relatively!

Handy hint to others who are keen to try out this fella, the stable version (1.2) does not play nice with PHP 5. Instead, grab one of the nightly builds which seem pretty stable (so far!), have a nicer install process, and work with PHP 5.

I was able to set up a number of instances, each sharing the one database reasonably easily (although it involves hacking the config file, as opposed to using the excellent web-based GUI through which you can configure every other option). All things going well, these other instances will play host to the jet-setting stories of other members of the Asman horde…