As much as I like the bstat functionality of bsuite, I never intended it to be a replacement for a full server log-based stats application. That’s why I’m happy my hosting provider offers AWStats. The reports suggested ways to optimize my pages so that I could control my bandwidth consumption — up to 3.7GB/day before optimization, now 1.8GB/day.

But today I found an AWStat feature that got me excited enough to email the university sysadmin about it: email stats. He once claimed that I received the most email of any user on campus, but he had to do the kind of command-line gymnastics that sysadmins are expected to do to figure it out. AWStats makes it easy and pretty, the kind of thing you show the CIO so s/he can bookmark it and know how hard you’re working.

tags: awstat, awstats, bandwidth consumption, email, http, log files, mail stats, optimize, report, reports, server log, web stats

I’ve been slowly struggling with the question of how to replace pMachine, my CMS engine here. I haven’t really liked any of the alternatives that others I know are using (link link link link), though I’ve been hard pressed to identify exactly what my complaints are. Among the points in Making A Better Open Source CMS, Jeffrey Veen names a few of the most frustrating for me: hard-coding of site layout in the CMS, mixing of content with site administration in the interface, and, sometimes, lax security.

He had spent some time at OpenSourceCMS, which allows anybody to fiddle with a variety of CMS installations without the time and trouble of figuring out how to install and configure them.

What I experienced was obtuse and complex software that was packed with gratuitous features at the expense of usability and user experience. It was software written by geeks, for geeks. This whole category of software desperately needs to be redesigned with writers, editors, designers, and site owners in mind.

…which is about exactly what my complaint against PHPNuke is. While he doesn’t actually identify anything that he’d recommend, I’m glad to know I’m not alone.

Update: of the four sites offered as examples above, three have switched to WordPress.

tags: cms, complex software, geeks, hard coding, http, lax security, open source, phpnuke, pmachine, switched, usability, wordpress