This page contains information about the server running this site and the visitors my sites get. Server? Don't imagine some sort of rack filled with massively expensive, powerful, fast, Blade or Edge computers. The computer you are viewing this page on is probably newer, faster and more powerful than the 2016 Dell Inspiron 3847 desktop that hosts these pages.
Personal Information: I do not have any information that makes my visitors easily identifiable, just the normal server logs that get produced every time anyone visits any website. I keep these logs because even after 20+ years, I'm still pleased with myself that anyone wants to read anything I write, whch makes them no more than glorified page counters, to identify pages that are giving problems and my most popular pages so I can write more.
Security: Most articles recommend that nothing like the following about the website, how it runs and the technology used, ever be made public. The information can be used to attack and disrupt the website. As you can see, I have completely ignored that advice.
Some useful sites for finding relatively simple information about any site are:
Apache's Server Status page has been enabled for this site.
I have decided to make the statistics obtained from my web logs public. The logs are subject to referer spam, so if the referring site looks suspicious in any of the reports, it probably is.
For years I used GoStats. That site stopped working properly in 2018, and I switched to Google Analytics and Microsoft's Clarify.
In March 2022, Google announced that their Universal Analytics was going away and that if you use it, then you should switch to Google Analytics 4 by July 1, 2023. The emails I got from Google explaining this made me reexamine the issue of my logs and what I was doing with them. As well as GoStats, I also used Analog, AWStats and Webalizer to beautify and analyze the server logs. I stopped using them around 2010, but in November 2022, I decided to take a second look at them. Most are now dead projects but they still work!
I use Analog CE, also available from GitHub. Analog is a simple program that requires no installation, and it can be run directly from the command line. The original web site (Internet Archive) is long gone, not being updated since 2005 and disappeared completely in 2014, but there are mirrors of it.
Analog is nice and easy to use especially as it has plenty of documentation. Dr. Stephen Turner who originally wrote Analog, has all the documentation for the various versions.
The only thing I forgot to do when setting it up was to copy the images folder, which also includes a CSS file, to the directory that contains the output statistics page.
ApacheTail
Apachetail is a free real-time Apache web server log monitoring tool that runs from a Windows Desktop.
AWStats is also available from GitHub. In December 2022, my server has changed quite a bit since I last used AWStats. It now runs on Windows and not Fedora Linux and hosts multiple sites. I have run into a lot of problems setting AWStats up properly and when I get it working again will write a page about the settings and configuration I used.
W3Perl
W3Perl is a free, open source log file analytics tool.
I use the Stone Steps version of Weblizer. which is also available on GitHub. The original website (Internet Archive) disappeared in 2021 but had not been updated since 2014.
Webalizer is very easy to set up. The only problem with it is that it overwrites its log files that are more than a year old. If you want to keep files longer than that then you need to create folders for each year. It's not hard, but you have to remember to do that yourself or write a script to do it for you.
There is even a GUI for Webalizer available.