Crooked Timber: Crooked Timber’s Greatest Hits :
In the course of the recent great database fiasco, I took a look at the history of traffic to this site. The AWStats program gave me a the number of unique visitors for every day from our launch last July through to June 16th this year. I was interested in which posts had made the biggest splashes.
I have been keeping a running tally of my most popular URLs over time and by day (in the left navbar on the index page of this weblog and at the top level of the site). But I’m curious to see this plotted over time as well: my nightly Webalyzer runs are useful but only in the aggregate. I’ll have to look into whether awstats can run on historical data or if it has to be in the loop all the time.
In the meantime, I took a look at visitors and ran this report. It’s a very fast program, but it’s hard to compare it against webalyzer since it doesn’t do DNS resolution or even make use of the work webalyzer has done (webalyzer has a 41 Mb cache of DNS lookups archived) .