Nisadas

The first thing anyone who’s set up a blog would want to know… well, generally it would be something like “How many people actually check this out?”. This is where web statistics come into play.

Previously I used Tracewatch, which was quite a handy piece of work. Now I use the WordPress Stats plugin, as well as an account at Statcounter. However, apart from Twatch (which I dropped since it doesn’t seem to have been updated in some time) the other two have been a little vague for my tastes.

Therefore, I looked around and found a free stat counter – AWStats. A little searching on the net led me to the easiest method to install AWStats on the Dreamhost wiki and also the method to install the GeoIP plugin for AWStats to figure out from where my visitors are coming from.

The only additional piece of work I did was setting up a .htaccess file to the otherwise cumbersome link to view the stats. By setting the DirectoryIndex to a PHP file, I then added the header(Location: “URL”) line to direct to the stats link.

Voila! I now have a working set of stats with the GeoIP plugin working…