There are a number of open source web stats programs out there. Many have been around for quite some time. The big 3 are Analog, Webalizer, and AWStats. I used to be a fan of the Analog + Report Magic combination. However Analog is now quite out of date. Webalyzer was recently updated after 4 years of stagnation. I tried out AWStats which has stayed current but found its setup to be cumbersome. In looking for alternatives I came across a number of newer, and often smaller, projects. The one I tried tonight was Visitors and I am extremely satisfied with it thus far. It was trivial to setup and the results were helpful. It focuses on per IP (Visitor) stats while ignoring some other stats which would be nice like overall page hits and traffic graphs. I’m hoping that it plus Piwik might be a good solution for most websites, though I recognize that AWStats, though unfun to configure, might still be necessary to meet some needs.

I was remarking to a colleague the other day that the reason there is so much filesystem development these days is that it is deeply understood, if not often expressed, that there are features which people want in a filesystem that are not available in any of the current filesystems. The problem, in my opinion, is that development efforts are so splintered that the lack of certain features does not lead to 1 or 2 new filesystems but far more. For disk file systems there is already Btrfs, NILFS, ext4, ChunkFS, Tux3, and more. And then there are cluster file systems…