Piwik is out (for now) and AWStats is in. The decision was not as clear cut as I would have hoped, but given my situation I think it’s for the best. Nothing against Piwik. I just have some limitations that make it a less than appealing option.
The dirty little secret is my blog (for now) is hosted on one of my home servers using my DSL connection. This works fine with a static IP, but it does not give the kind of performance that you might be accustomed to from a hosting company. The simple problem with Piwik was that it was adding overhead to page views by the Javascript running and generating extra traffic. I noticed that when I loaded my blog remotely I was seeing up to a 4 to 5 second delay. The page was loaded, but the browser was still running the Javascript in the background. I decided this was not for me.
Once my blog is hosted on a more robust connection, I may revisit this. For now I’m using AWStats to parse my Apache log files and give me an indication of the type of traffic I’m getting. I do have regular visitors, but not enough of them to cause me any concern. If I should have some success at SEO then AWStats should tell me when that occurs. It’s a pretty easy tool to use. You just need to have Perl installed. I use Active State Perl. Then you just follow the directions to copy the files over, set them up and run the awstats.bat file which generates the database and stats.html document.
When Piwik was beginning to bother me I started testing AWStats. With a little patience I was able to set it up and generate the report. The data is well formatted and covers all the important categories that I was relying on Piwiks to provide. If you are looking for an Open Source log analyzer then I recommend you give AWStats a try. If you know of a better one in the Open Source community then please post a comment and let me know. I’ll be happy to try it out.
