PHP Logging

What to do if your domain host does not allow you to read the server log for your domain, stopping you from analyzing your website traffic the way you d like to? Well, create your own logfile of course ! I recently set up a new domain (coolt.nu, it s in Swedish, you might not want to visit it :) and faced the problem that my domain host wouldn t generate the statistics I wanted. I also found that they would not let me read/process the logfile my...

In my opinion, the best thing about working in the development phase is the liberty to throw your errors to the browser, without too many worries of prying eyes. Once your project is live, however, these errors can be very risky business and naturally they should be supressed. This carries with it the disadvantage of complicating the debugging process if something goes wrong. One great way to suppress these demons, without losing any valuable in...

Ring Ring, I pick up the phone and hear I need to put my real estate properties on my website, can you do this. I do not want to input them twice, once in the MLS and again on your our own site. Sure, I say, and hang up the phone. Now what. After hours of trying to parse through an MLS listing on the internet with unsuccessful results I stumble upon RETS. What is this? Well it is a standard that all companies offering MLS listings ...

I have to warn you not to be misled by the title of this article. It isn t really about cutting down trees with PHP.

Figuring out where your hits are coming from and which pages are being viewed is not too difficult if you use a good log analyzer like Analog or something similar. But if you want to pull up reports on the fly at any time, you need to take a different route. For about six months, I was importing my Apache logs into an SQL database and then running ad-hoc queries against that. Unfortunately, that requires me to go out and manually grab those log ...

If nothing else, programmers are eternal optimists. We enter each project somehow convinced of a perfect outcome, despite the often considerable technical and logistical difficulties inherent to our profession. Computer Science is after all still in its infancy, and our tools, not to mention development techniques, remain quite immature. Resultingly, one outcome that you can be sure of as you embark on the next pursuit of programming perfection ...

Figuring out where your hits are coming from and which pages are being viewed is not too difficult if you use a good log analyzer like Analog or something similar. But if you want to pull up reports on the fly at any time, you need to take a different route. For about six months, I was importing my Apache logs into an SQL database and then running ad-hoc queries against that. Unfortunately, that requires me to go out and manually grab those log ...

If you have a website, especially one that sells products or services, it can be useful to track the visitors to your site. This article explains how to write a program that will do just that.

Logging is an old subject. It s simple just record the page requested, time, IP number and maybe the refering URL. Instantly you can draw up graphs on the most popular pages, the best referers etc. This in its own right is very useful. However, when I was looking at the logs on one of my larger sites, I thought - I know that page x gets so many hits a day, but the user could have come to that page using a variety of different routes. How do us...

Every ISP needs a log file analysis program. One of the best is the Webalizer, an open source product originally written in Perl and rewritten in C soon thereafter. It can parse both Common Log Format and Combined Log Format files at a blistering pace. One benchmark states that On a 200Mhz pentium machine, over 10,000 records can be processed in one second, with a 40 Megabyte file taking roughly 15 seconds (over 150,000 records). When one of my ...