Seeking satisfaction in statistics

Of course I like the idea of people visiting my website(s), but I am not a slave to any kind of analysis. I seldom look at the numbers I gather from the stats package provided by my host, and even more rarely at Google Analytics (which this site does not have). And the only changes I make as a result of looking at those stats is, occasionally, to fix a broken internal link.

Nevertheless, it would be nice to have a general sense of whether people are visiting, how they're doing so, the whole people vs bots thing. So when I came across Bise, a blog-readership reporter I gave it a read, and then another, and asked some questions, and stored it away and then, today, decided to give it a go. Well, that was not to be, for a whole series of reasons. The most important, had I done a little more preliminary investigation, is that the naming convention my host uses for logs is not what Bise expects. It also saves only three days worth of logs, whereas the author of Bise reckons one gets a good picture from a rolling look, weekly, at the past two weeks of logs.

So I could have saved myself the minor stress of being unable to install all the dependencies and everything else that got in the way. However, that also suggests a solution.

If I downloaded the logs each day, I could rename them according to what Bise expects. That would be a useful learning exercise. And if I could then get Bise working locally, I'd be home free, obsessing over my numbers.

Big ifs, for me, but still. Shifting this to the back burner for a little while.

Photo from Bill Oxford on Unsplash.