Downloading web server logs allows you to see the Apache log file of activity to your blog. The data in log files can be used to identify who visits your blog and what content is downloaded. Log files are available in text format, and logs must be parsed in order to be processed or to make the data easily readable. See the Apache help for more information on Apache log files.
All confidential information has been removed from the log files.
Log files are generated once a day, and will appear between 12 midnight and 4 a.m. Eastern time for the previous day if there was activity to your blog. Seven days of logs are kept.
In this topic
| 1. | Click the Dashboard tab. |
| 2. | From the options listed below the Dashboard tab, click the Site Stats link. The Web Stats page opens. |
| 3. | From the Detailed Stats section, click Download Web Server Log. The logs for the last seven days are listed. The last seven days will always be listed Sunday to Saturday, in that order, regardless of the current day of the week. See the value in the Generation Date column to identify the day for which you want to download data. |
| 4. | Click the day for which you want to download the log file of activity. |
| 5. | Once you've downloaded the log file, you can extract the data by parsing the log file. |
Each log file includes one entry for each activity. This is an example of a single entry with a description of the information included in the entry.
[17/Jan/2006:08:30:46 -0500](TIME) 0(LENGTH) 200(RESULT) 11202(BYTES) POST(METHOD) blog.blogware.com(REQUESTED HOST) 10.0.12.165(REQUESTOR) "/blog/"(RESOURCE REQUESTED) "http://blog.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/1/16/84.html"(REFERRER)
"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050927 Debian/1.7.8-1sarge3"(BROWSER TYPE) "POST /blog/ HTTP/1.1"(LINE) - - "text/html"(TYPE)
TIME |
Time that the request was made. This is in Eastern time (the location of the servers). |
LENGTH |
How long it took to serve the request. |
RESULT |
The result code of the request, which includes: 200 and 300 series (success), 400- unable to fulfill request, 500- internal server errors. |
BYTES |
How many bytes were sent, excluding HTTP headers. |
METHOD |
Request method. Common methods include GET (to get info), POST (to post an article, comment, etc.). |
REQUESTED HOST |
The hostname of the blog that was requested. |
REQUESTOR |
The IP address of the requester. |
RESOURCE REQUESTED |
The particular area or file on the blog that was requested (viewed). |
REFERRER |
The site that referred them to the blog. |
BROWSER TYPE |
The type of browser that accessed the blog. |
LINE |
The first line of request. |
TYPE |
Response content type. |
Instead of downloading log files from the Publisher Control Panel, you can receive log files using an FTP client. This enables you to automate how you get the data on a daily basis. See Uploading files via FTP for more information.
A folder called _weblogs has been added to your blog's folder directory. Inside that folder there will be up to 14 files; two files for each of the last seven days. One file contains the log data (e.g., 1.log), while the second file contains the date of that log file (e.g., 1.log.meta).
The files in the _weblogs folder always have the same filename:
1.log 1.log.meta |
log file for the most recent Monday date of that Monday's log file |
2.log 2.log.meta |
log file for the most recent Tuesday date of that Tuesday's log file |
3.log 3.log.meta |
log file for the most recent Wednesday date of that Wednesday's log file |
4.log 4.log.meta |
log file for the most recent Thursday date of that Thursday's log file |
5.log 5.log.meta |
log file for the most recent Friday date of that Friday's log file |
6.log 6.log.meta |
log file for the most recent Saturday date of that Saturday's log file |
7.log 7.log.meta |
log file for the most recent Sunday date of that Sunday's log file |
