I like knowing where my readers are coming from by looking at the referrers for my sites. It gives you a better idea of your readership — not that we are identifying specific readers, but with referrers you certainly see what other sites people are reading as well, perhaps providing insight into the types of things they are reading elsewhere.

While many software packages exist to track and create statistics they don’t always provide the detail we would like to see. Using some command line tools (don’t be afraid…) you can get some very fine details from your access logs.
Continue reading Slice and Dice your Access Logs

The other day I told the story of The Case of the Missing Defensive Design. It is a story of how some other site didn’t provide default error pages, which lead a confused user that was at a dead end to do a search for the error text, which landed them on one of my sites (WATS.ca) – specifically on our Resource page that lists HTTP error/status codes and what they mean.

While preparing that post, I was checking our referrer logs looking at requests for that page. Here’s what I found:
Continue reading These aren’t the pages you are looking for