The WebDruid is a piece
of software that generates statistics reports for web sites. It
is free software, released under the GNU
GPL.
It works by reading the log files generated by the web server, and
by producing a report written in HTML. This report can then be used
by end users with a simple web browser.
Why should i use it rather than product xxx ?
Here are a few cases where you would like to use it.
- You're webmaster of your own website, you're in
charge of your small school website, or a small web agency, and
you don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a commercial log
analysis package...
- You've got a web site which generates hundreds
of thousands of visits a day. The WebDruid
might well be the only log analysis tool that would not require
you to buy a dedicate machine just to compute basic statistics
:-)...
- You've checked the Roadmap...
and you're quite impressed by what the future could be...and you're
right! The WebDruid will evolve
quickly to implement all these great new features.
Key features
There are many log files analysis tools avaible, both free and commercial.
That is what makes the choice so difficult. I'll try to make you find
your way in this mess:
- It's written using the C language, which allows
it to be extremely fast. It won't kill the machine on which it
runs. That's why many people use it on the same machine that hosts
the web site.
- It works on almost any Unix system
- Its output is quite tunable through the use of
a configuration file or command line parameters
- It supports Common
Logfile Format server logs. In addition, several variations
of the Combined
Logfile Format are supported.
- Generated reports are independant, can be moved,
copyed, stored on CD. No database system, nor web server is required
to read reports.
- And of course it has its own features no others
have:
- It produces nice graphs displaying what users are doing
in the site.
- It gives a fine grained analysis of what key words in which
engines people use to reach each page.
Documentation
A complete documentation is available in the source archive, and is
also here.
It contains all what you need to run The WebDruid on your favourite
UNIX Platform.
Demo site
Here is a sample site, showing you a report with
all features of the very latest release enabled, so that you can
just make your own opinion of The WebDruid.
Better than long talks, just see
it in action!
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