There are few things that are as much fun as spying on the people who visit your web sites (and yes, everybody does it – no matter what they say :P !). For one thing, you can see what pages are popular, where your readers come from and what browsers they use (for the inclined geek of importance ;) ). On the other hand, you can see what surfers were looking for, and that is always highly interesting and entertaining.

In order to fulfill your slightly voyeuristic task, you can either dig through endless rows of machine-generated server logs, or you can use a counter. Here you have the choice between one of the countless (priceless pun, I know :P ) counter services or a script that you install on your server.

I have used NedStat for quite a while until they shut down their free service, and since then StatCounter was my choice. There are two drawbacks to their offer, though: first, you can only view the last 100 log hits in detail. Unless you have absolutely nothing better to do than constantly check your statistics, this is a hassle. Plus their server isn’t always available when you want to access your data – but hey, it’s a free service. The one big plus is that they offer an invisible counter, which isn’t self-evident at other services.

The reason I didn’t use scripts so far is that a) they are usually not free and b) the ones that are free, I was too much of a dummy to get them installed (AWStats, I’m looking at you) :P . Webalizer is okay but not detailed enough for real-time statistics.

But now I found something that is easy as it can get: chCounter. Uploaded the files, added the counter code to my footer, et voilà, the statistics are up and running.

And it’s all there: top pages, referrers, search engines, keywords, browsers, operating systems, robots, user-agents, top level domains, screen resolutions and access statistics for day, week, month and year, all in a clear and simple interface: heaven for any webmaster :) !