JAWStats Web Stats news

I know, I know, I've been real busy

Sunday, 5th October 2008

Apologies it's been a long time since I last gave you an update, things have been manic here the last two months.

The good news is that I have made progress towards v0.7 and all the multi-lingual niceness it will bring. It's not ready yet, but it is finally on the horizon!

What I really want to talk about today is the arrival of the JAWStats forum. I have lots of questions that need answering over the coming weeks and months so please, jump right in.

Whoops, I screwed up

Monday, 4th August 2008

I made a mistake when creating the release packages yesterday; the new "page views" tab does not appear as it should. Many apologies and I'll get it fixed within today!

Update: This is now FIXED! Sorry for any confusion or inconvenience this simple mistake may have caused you.

Version 0.6 Beta Released

Sunday, 3rd August 2008

Eagerly awaited (I hope) here comes JAWSTATS version 0.6 BETA! Changes this version are:

1. Page Views tab added (woohoo!)
2. Use PHP file_get_contents() instead of file() to save memory and speed things up. Many, many thanks to Piotr Przybylski for pointing this out.
3. Graphs added to "This Month" calendars
4. "Change Site" list now scrolls for those with many sites to monitor (Thank you, Alen Krmelj!)
5. Display bug in Page Referrers squashed
6. "Undefined" bug in Operation System breakdown fixed
7. Tiny display fix on spiders tab
8. Misc tidy ups

I hope you enjoy it. As always, write to me at jon@[the-name-of-this-project].com with your comments, bug reports or just to say hello. For those who haven't yet, don't forget to hop on the mailing list (look on the right hand side).

Mailing List added

Sunday, 13th July 2008

While you wait patiently for version 0.6 to arrive (which is looking good by the way, "page" breakdowns will be with us soon) I've created a JAWStats mailing list. This just enables me to announce things like new releases etc. Yes, I appreciate I could do this via RSS - and I will be doing very soon - but until then, this is the easiest way. I promise not to spam anyone and will keep messages infrequent and relevant. You can of course choose to unsubscribe at any time.

A quick note about "themes"

Sunday, 29th June 2008

A couple of people have written to me regarding the colour scheme of the JAWStats and their suggestions of how to better it. From day one, JAWStats was designed to fully skinnable, the long term idea being that "themes" could be downloaded and interchanged freely. I will add other themes over time and hopefully other users will make many more too.

However, as this is still beta software, there are a couple of things preventing that happening right now. Sure, you can edit the CSS stylesheet but there is no way yet to dynamically change the colours of the graphs and pie-charts. Until this is done, it is probably a little more effort than it is worth to generate new themes at this time. I would hate for someone to go to a load of effort now only for them to have to redo chunks of what they've done because I need to change some code later.

As always, I can't say "thank you" enough to the people who have written to me. Your suggestions are being noted, and any themes sent to me when we hit the big v1.0 will be hosted on this site (credited to the creator of course) and be available for download.

As always please do write to me at jon@[the-name-of-this-project].com. Cheerio!

Version 0.5 Beta Released

Saturday, 28th June 2008

Woah, Nelly! Why so fast? Apologies to those who are tired of deploying new versions but I'm on a roll. Version 0.5 is here and the key changes are:

1. Search Engine referrals statistics added (tucked into the existing "Referrers" tab)
2. Session Duration statistics added (see: "Session" tab)
3. Footer-text-not-showing-in-some-browsers bug fixed
4. NaN%-country-traffic-volume bug fixed

Thanks for watching, I'm off down the pub.

Version 0.4 Beta Released

Thursday, 26th June 2008

Behold version 0.4. The key changes are:

1. HTTP Status code tab added with additional 404 "file not found" breakdown
2. Change-month-switch-tab bug fixed
3. "Wrong" default table sorting on Browser and OS pages fixed
4. Embarrassing sorting bug on "Top 10 Referrers" bug wrestled to the ground

I'd like to make a huge apology to those who have kindly taken the time to write to me and that I've responded to properly yet. I promise I'll be writing very soon.

Version 0.3 Beta Released

Saturday, 14th June 2008

Hot on the heels of v0.2 comes v0.4 v0.3! Lots has been added and tidied up for this release and although there is still a looooong way to go, JAWStats is really starting to take shape. The key changes are:

1. Operating System tab added
2. Include your own, err, includes (see the manual)
3. "Top 10 Referrers" (and "Top 50") added - 'cos that's what the kids want *
4. "Referres by TLD" dropped - an utterly pointless report and ugly resource theif
5. Numbers->-999,999-table-sorting bug fixed
6. Month totals added to "This Month" calendars
7. First / Prev / Next / Last quick change month buttons
8. More filetypes added *
9. Tiny-display-bug-in-pie-charts-when-no-data-is-available bug fixed
10. Browser logos added
11. Improved Number Formatting function

* Many thanks to Adrian Rollet (see previous post) for your help with these, there is more of your stuff still to come.

p.s. Daniel at notjustalabel.com, your request is already being looked at. :)

p.p.s. Got any feedback, requests or suggestions? Write to me at jon@[the-name-of-this-project].com.

JAWStats got mail!

Thursday, 12th June 2008

Last week I was chuffed to bits to get my first outside email regarding this project. Mr Adrian Rollett, a web services Systems Manager at the University of North Texas, contacted me to discuss the future of JAWStats.

"I'd like to thank you for your excellent work in coding JAWStats - it's by far the nicest and most useful (in terms of quickly getting the information you're looking for) of any free (and probably most for-pay) statistics visualization packages out there. I'm currently in the process of putting JAWStats in production for all our web statistics here at UNT."

Wow. He goes on in a follow up email, quoting another user from the university.

"It's exactly what we needed - quick stats to satisfy some questions about traffic patterns.

The interface is really nice - and it's a good overview of traffic between months, etc. In the end, Google Analytics is still the king, but this provides us a quick check for those sites we haven't got GA installed on."

Wow, again. Adrian kindly explained in depth a few bugs - some of which I knew about, some I didn't - and suggested a few things that could be done to improve the software further. I would list them here but I believe I've managed to tackle the majority of them already and I hope to be able to release this to the world inside the next couple of days.

If anyone else has any comments or suggestions regarding JAWStats, no matter how big or small, I'd love to hear from you. Until I get a proper contact form organised on this site, please do write to me at jon@[the-name-of-this-project].com.

Adrian: Thank you very, very much.

Sorry for the mammoth wait, Version 0.2 Beta is here

Sunday, 1st June 2008

What's New? Well, this is a bug-fix / tidy-up release to prove the project is still alive. Sorry it has taken so long but life gets in the way sometimes. The core changes are:

1. Average-number-of-visitors-per-day-laughably-inaccurate-when-looking-at-a-historical-month bug fixed.
2. Number formatting bug fixed. Funnily enough 1.9999 != 1.0. Schoolboy error, kamikaze defending.
3. Yearly counts fixed. 13 months in a year? Unlucky.

Go see the demo and get the latest download.

Version 0.1 Beta Released!

Monday, 26th November 2007

The first version is still available for public consumption from the download archives.