Having set up the fine automated logging system we saw in the previous chapter, it's now time to look in more depth at how we can use this information. While it sits in the log files it's simply eating up disk space for no reason, and if we don't use it we are wasting precious server resources collecting it in the first place. Remember, the aim of all this is to be able to justify our site budget, and to plan for the future.
In fact the log files contain a great deal of useful information, if only we can find ways of getting at it quickly and efficiently. For example, we can tell (approximately) which country our visitors come from. So, we may decide that we need to provide pages in different languages, or tailored for different cultures. We can also tell which browsers our visitors are using. If the breakdown for our site differs widely from the average for the Web as a whole, it may be that we aren’t providing proper support for some browser types. And this is just the tip of the iceberg as far information about the performance of the site is concerned.
In this chapter, we'll show you some of the ways that you can build reports that release this valuable information from your data. We'll also, very briefly, consider how you might use the information once you find it. You'll see:
To start with, we'll look at the data we've been accumulating in our log files, and see what uses we can put it to.