This website is hosted by Hurricane Electric Internet Services (www.he.net) in Fremont, CA. H.E. uses /home/accountname/logs/access_log for their accounting purposes. They will roll over the log to /home/accountname/access_log before they delete their log at midnight. My hit-count program runs after midnight and analyzes the rolled-over access_log. It is an alternative to Hurricane Electric's "Status Report" -> "Web Activity Report" -> "Total Transfers By File".

• This hit-count program is a cron job that runs at 1 A.M. every night, and processes yesterday's data.
• It generates a running report in web page format for the current month.
• At end of month it creates a final web page report for last month.
• It tracks hits only for desired pages that are listed in text file pagelist.txt. For all file types in a directory, like all the pdf files in the news directory, news/*.pdf can be specified.
• It does not count most page refreshes, nor return to home page from this website.
• Webmaster hits can be omitted from the count via a webmaster check-in page, or by copying index.html to nocount.html (see nixlist.txt info below).
• It treats /, /xxxxx and /xxxxx/ as hits on index.htm (or index.html), where xxxxx is a directory.
• It shows hits from results pages of search engines listed in file searchlist.txt. (e.g. google.com, yahoo.com). For example, this is where someone did a Google search and clicked on a link that went to the website.
• As shown above at the link for "Running search log", the search log is a running file that clearly shows the page referenced, search engine, and search string.
• Hit counts are ignored when a referrer is listed in file nixlist.txt. To ignore webmaster hits, the home page can be copied to, for example, nocount.html. Put "nocount.html" in nixlist.txt, and use nocount.html as the webmaster's home page.
• The History Log shows execution detail for a day's run, including run time, time of the first access_log record, referring pages, total pagecounts skipped due to webmaster hits, refresh, returns to home page, etc.

A copy of this 1200-line highly documented and commented Perl program is available for $35.00.
See email address at the top of my home page. Note that your web server might handle access_log differently. Your webmaster should be familiar with doing the following web server procedures.

1. telnet or SSH logon access to the web server, and basic UNIX knowledge.
2. Modify configuration parameters in the Perl script. FTP PUT to cgi-bin/. chmod 755.
3. On the web server, cd /home/accountname, touch access_log.
4. On the web server, do crontab -e and create the crontab entry
     0 1 * * * /home/accountname/cgi-bin/page_hits.pl.

Click here to view the configuration section of the hit count program.