Excluding unnecessary hits from Web Log Storming reports by using global filters is an effective way to improve software performance. Newly added option in version 2.2 makes this process easier. Please read this short tutorial to see how to use it.
How to Easily Exclude Unnecessary Hits?
Web Log Storming v2.2 is now available for download. Changes in this release include several small new features, improvements and bug fixes.
Now you can more easily add unnecessary files to global filters (see “Improving performance” suggestions). To use it, view any of file reports (pages, files, images, directories, etc), see which files take lot of hits that doesn’t affect your stats (style sheets, logo images, etc), right click on them and choose “Add to Global Filters” option. Next time you read log files these will be excluded from reports.
This one is available in Sessions, Domains and Session Details report. You can now change visitor’s domain name to any text you like, so instead of having something like qwerty123456.domain.com, you can describe visitors as My home network or Important customer.
If you don’t need some of options, you can now buy less expensive Standard edition of Web Log Storming. Currently, Standard edition costs $119 (US) while Professional remains at the same price point ($189). Removed features include goals, host resolving, exchange options (export, print, send by e-mail, …), some reports, etc. For full list of differences please refer to this page.
Upon start, users who are evaluating trial version can choose which edition they want to try out. Existing customers won’t notice any change from this as all of you already have Professional version.
Other less important improvements and bug fixes.
Links:
Web Log Storming home page
Download an update
Compare editions
In just few days I’ve came across three examples of how “software for free” model hardly works, at least for developers. One of them is tr.im, the service to shorten long URLs. According to their blog, they’ve unsuccessfully tried to find an investor for their service. Of course, without proper funding, why would they spend any more time on it? And moreover, who will pay for hosting and other administrative fees? Second example is a project management / source control service codespaces.com. They recently decided to cease free plan and started charging $3 for it.
Another popular example is a great instant messaging client Digsby. They are trying to find a sustainable reason to continue developing it, and, as it seems, they plan to do that by displaying advertisements. In my opinion it’s a wrong method. So called “adware” model was popular about 10 years ago and it failed miserably. What happened now is that part of the community is actually angry on Digsby management. Can you believe it?
Related joke
One man was giving a $100 bill to a beggar every single day. After some time, those 100 bucks gradually became 50, 40, 30, and finally one day he gave him only $10.
B: Excuse me, sir. Can I ask you something?
M: Sure!
B: How come you always gave me $100 and now it’s only $10?
M: Well, you know, in the meantime I got married and we got a kid, our expenses are much higher now, we are building a new house…
B: A house? You are building a house? With MY money???
There simply must be a way of paying those developer-days/months/years or the whole project is doomed. Just browse some of Open Source repositories and check how many software sits abandoned. Alas, developers must eat too. 
Some businesses succeeded to persuade Venture Capitalist to initially invest money for the development, but sooner or later this VC will stop throwing funds away and expect the return of this investment. It’s simply how economy works, like it or not. As some have predicted before, this whole “software should be free” bubble will burst, and it’s now becoming evident for those who didn’t believe it.
Before someone says “electrons are free so software should be too”, here’s few considerations to think about:
So there’s really no point arguing on this. Lawyers don’t charge just for cost of a peace of paper, taxi drivers don’t charge just for a gas, professional football players don’t play for free, cars are not priced just on value of raw materials – the list can go on and on. So why then some people think that developers should charge just for a CD?
Of course, some free-to-use software will always exist, but in a long term, it must pay off in one way or another. Being it through consulting and support (applicable for enterprise markets), advertisements, information access (various Google products), offering a premium version, or whatever works in a specific case.
So, people, you have no right to assume to get something for nothing – at least not forever…
In addition to an educational 30% discount, we have just announced a competitive discount of 20% or 40% (depending on product). We believe that this could be a nice opportunity to either switch to Web Log Storming or to use it as an additional analytics tool. You just need to send us a screen shot with a proof – it could be a picture of the About box with your name in it (if it’s a desktop solution) or a picture of a web page for a hosted solution.
For paid packages (either desktop or hosted) the discount is 40%, which means that you can get new Web Log Storming license for only $113.40 (US).
And this could surprise you. The discount is currently available even if you use free analytics package, but with an additional condition: you must use it for at least two months (make sure you set date range accordingly when taking a screen shot). In this case discount is 20% and your price would be $151.20 (US).
The offer is also available for the upgrade from old version of Web Log Storming ($47.40 / $63.20).
Visit Web Log Storming website for more information
In this article we are going to point out some objective strengths of web server log analysis compared to JavaScript based statistics, such is Google Analytics. Depending on your preferences and type of the website, you might find some or all of these arguments applicable or not. In any case, everyone should be at least aware of differences in order to make a right decision.
Depending on how your website is organized, this could be a major tasks, especially if it contains lot of static HTML pages. Adding script code to all of them will surely take time. If your website is based on some content management system with centralized design template, you’ll still need to be careful not to forget adding code to any additional custom pages outside this CMS.
Regardless of what Google Analytics officials say, actual experiences prove otherwise. Scripts are scripts and they must take some time to load. If external file is located on a third-party server (as it’s the case with Google Analytics), the slowdown is even more noticeable, because visitor’s browser must resolve another domain.
As a solution they suggest putting inclusion code at the end of the page. Indeed, in that case it would appear that page is loaded more quickly, but the truth is that there’s a good chance that visitor will click another link before script is executed. As a result, you won’t see these hits in stats and they are lost forever.
With JavaScript analytics, stats are available only for periods when code was included. If you forget to put code on some pages, the opportunity is forever lost. Similarly, if you decide to start collecting stats today, you’ll never be able to see stats from yesterday or before. Same applies to goals: metrics are available only after you decide to track them. With some log analyzers, you can freely add more goals anytime and still be able to analyze them based on log files from the past.
By using solely JavaScript based analytics, you don’t have any information about hits to images, XML files, flash (SWF), programs (EXE), archives (ZIP, GZ), etc. Although you could consider these hits irrelevant, they are not for most webmasters. Even if you don’t usually maintain other types of files, you must have some images on your website, which could be linked from external websites without you knowing anything about it.
Although you might not be aware of it, most hosting providers limit bandwidth usage and usually base their pricing on it. Bandwidth usage costs them and, naturally, it most probably costs you as well. You would be surprised how much domains (usually from third-world countries) poll your whole website on a regular basis, possibly wasting gigabytes of your bandwidth every day. If you could identify these domains, you could easily block their traffic.
Similar as previous point, some (bogus) spiders misbehave and they are wasting your bandwidth, while you don’t have any benefit from them. In addition, server logs also contain information about visits from legitimate bots, such are Google or Yahoo. By using solely JavaScript based analytics you have no idea how often they come and which pages they visit.
Certain percentage of users choose to turn off JavaScript, and some of them use browsers that don’t support it at all. These visits can’t be identified by JavaScript based analytics.
Hackers could attack your website with various methods, but neither of them would be recorded by JavaScript analytics. As every access to your web server is contained in log files, you are able to identify them and save yourself from damage (by blacklisting their domains or closing security holes on your website).
Without them, in general case, you don’t have any information about errors and status codes (such are Page not found, Internal server error, Forbidden, etc.). Without it, you are missing possible technical problems with your website that lower overall visitor’s perception of its quality. Moreover, any attempt to access forbidden areas of your website can be easily identified.
And last but not least, your stats are not available to a third-party who can use them at their convenience. Google has bought all rights for, at that time, popular and quite expensive web statistics product (Urchin), repackaged it, and then allowed to anyone to use it for free. The question is: why? They surely get something in return, as Google Analytics license agreement allows them to use your information for their purposes, and even to share it with others if you choose to participate in sharing program.
What could they possibly use? Just to give few obvious ideas: tweaking AdWords minimum bids, deciding how to prioritize ads, improving their services (and profits) – all based on traffic data collected from you and others.
Busting the Google Analytics Mythbuster
Which web log analyzer should I use?
What price Google Analytics? (by Dave Collins)
Web Log Storming – an interactive web log analyzer
|
