World Wide Creations

Monitoring your web site is a very important task that many webmasters attempt every day. There are many commercial methods to accomplishing this but if you have a Unix/Linux/*nix based server with Apache, you can monitor your traffic free of cost with very little work.

We at WorldWideCreations.com have released a free program that will let you watch your users as they come in, and which pages/files they are viewing and also quite a bit of information about them. You can find the Active Log Monitor here:

http://www.worldwidecreations.com/free_scripts.htm

The ALM basically just uses the tail program that comes with Linux/Unix to monitor the Apache log file and parses the information to present it to you in a readable form to your web browser. You could use the tail program from your shell, but for many, the information tells them little in raw form.

With the ALM script in place, you get to watch your activity in real time, so if your server all of a sudden is getting bogged down with a lot of hits, you can investigate these hits and even see where the visitors are coming from with the referral information. IP’s can easily be resolved with one click on the interface so you can get an idea where a particular user is coming from.

We recommend you run this script in a password protected directory because only you should view your log activity.

We hope to provide all of you with more helpful webmaster scripts in the future!