Every guy with a webpage eventually gets really curious about who is reading his website and whether he's doing anything worthwhile or if he's just entertaining himself. Serious webmasters will ensure they get server logs so they can analyze their traffic thoroughly. The web package that I purchased through my host gives me some standard web site statistics (produced by Report Magic) and these reports are great as summary information. But if I want to look at my actual server logs I'm out of luck unless I want to pay an extra couple bucks a month for them.

Ok, so I'm cheap. Instead of doing that, I thought I'd brush off my PHP manual and figure out how to do it myself. It wasn't that hard to do. Consider that it only took a couple hours time, I wasn't testing it locally (had to FTP every time), and my PHP knowledge is maybe just a notch above novice (though my familiarity with C/C++ certainly helps). Read the rest of this entry ...