Webalizer Take II

It's been a long long time since I used anything other than analog to process my web server log files. My own analyzer - Log Mine is still half baked (heck it's hardly even ready for the oven after all these years). Analog itself is showing signs of age and hasn't been updated in a long time. So I decided to take another look at Webalizer. My last experiment with it was more than three years ago.

At the time, webalizer couldn't process your log file if it's in a custom log format. Fortunately they seem to have added that feature in recent times. Your need to look at your apache configuration file and make a similar entry in  webalizer.conf In order to make my the logs acceptable to it. In my case the following line had to be added:

ApacheLogFormat %h %l %u %t "%r" %s %b "%{Referer}i" "%{User-agent}i" %v

Yet, even after doing so the parser continued to ignore every single line in the log. Then It occurred to me that webalizer might be ignoring the log file because of an existing history file. Sure enough getting rid of /var/www/usage/* along with /var/lib/webalizer/webalizer.hist and /var/lib/webalizer/webalizer.current did the trick.

I sure wish the output was easier on the eye though. Little things like ',' to separate thousands and a little bit of padding inside the table cells would go a long way.

The reason that I decided to have another look at other log analyzers is because the huge discrepency between the number of impressions reported by adsense and the number of page views reported by analog. There is at times a five fold difference.  I was even tempted to sign up for openx for that reason.