I have recently been toying with the Light Side. I have been using non-Microsoft technologies. Although I am pro-Microsoft, I acknowledge that there is a whole world out there, much of which does just fine without Microsoft. So I have installed Perl, although I use it (mostly) through IIS. The primary motivator for this was log file analysis – to report on who visits my websites, when, for how long, where they came from etc. I am using an Open Source tool called AWStats, and it does quite nicely. I would love to have a bit more drill-down, but it is free.
The information that AWStats gathers from the data is very interesting. In the week that I have been running the analysis I have had 126 unique visitors, averaging over 3 visits each. I did not expect to be so popular. I always assumed that my readers were me, Kirsten and Spong. It seems I underestimated the draw of my google stacking. Of particular interest is the search terms used to find me. “Darryn” is the winner, followed by “southern-charms tristan”, which is some kind of pantyhose-related porn. I don’t know why I rank so well on this search. I swear. Other people are looking for a 3D model of the Phoenix, and some people still have problems with their mouse in XIII. About 74% of visitors use Internet Explorer, 22% use other (I assume that this is Kirsten, Tristan and Myself, as we all use Avant, which rocks). I don’t know what user-agent RocketFuel RSSGrabber comes up as, but since my RSS feed is the most hit page on my website, I think it must rcome up as IE. Will have to talk to the development team about that one.
This perl stuff reminds me – if you know of any GUI tool to add and remove AT jobs in NT-based operating systems, please drop me a line. Also, I should acknowledge this article for helping me to get Perl and AWStats working.