[BlueOnyx:07673] Re: Capturing stats

[Michael Stauber]

Hi James,

>  I created (let's say) www.tiny.com and then went to the httpd include and
>  manually updated that to force everything to redirect to http://tiny.com
>  when accessed with www or anything else I may have aliased to it.

Since a couple of weeks you don't have to hack the include file anymore for 
that. For each site you can configurethis behaviour through the GUI via the 
"Web Alias Redirects" switch on each site. If the checkbox is ticked, every 
access to a web alias will redirect to the FQDN of the site.

So if the site is named www.tiny.com in the GUI and has the aliases tiny.com 
and mail.tiny.com, then accessing it by http://tiny.com or 
http://mail.tiny.com will redirect to http://www.tiny.com

If the checkbox is unticked, it will not rewrite the URLs.

The drawback of not rewriting the URLs is of course that traffic statistics 
generated from the logs will count each of those records as acess to spearate 
sites.

> The second issue, and the one I'd really like to correct, is that I don't
> get any stats tracked for this site.  I would assume that is because
> webalizer is collecting info based on accesses of www.tiny.com while I've
> sent all traffic through tiny.com instead.  Is there some file or DB entry
> I could adjust to "trick" the stats processing into picking up tiny.com
> stats for my perusal? 

Not really, sorry.

Check out http://www.piwik.org, which is sort of a Google Analytics without 
the scary "big brother" part of feeding all your data to Google. It generates 
the best possible kind of stats that you can get (in realtime!) and Piwik is 
open source and available free of charge.

You need to imbed a small snippet of code into every webpage that you want to 
have tracked by Piwik, but if you're using a CMS or dynamically generated 
webpages, that should be fairly easy to integrate.

I also have a PKG in my shop that makes Piwik available for every site with a 
GUI integration, but you can of course just grab the tarball from 
www.piwik.org and install it manually on a site to play around with it.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber