New Stats for M-W.com

Over the summer, the statistics package for my domain m-w.com blew up on me. I had been using the same package since I set up the site in 1999 and I think it just became old and obsolete. After filing an error report to technical support for the third time within a few months -- the stats were not updating -- they deleted all trace of the old package. I took the hint and installed a new package, called Urchin.

The last time I wrote about site stats was earlier this year in Photos of February. Like most of my posts on the subject, it was based on my own analysis of the site's log file. Could Urchin duplicate what I had been doing myself? I waited until enough time had passed to collect a few months of log data, then looked at Urchin for the month of September. A summary is shown below.

Report: Status and Errors - mark-weeks.com

The table gives a count of requests to the server and how they were resolved. For me, the most urgent are the '404: Not Found' errors. A few years ago I analyzed these in Most 'HTTP 404' Are External Errors. The conclusions I derived then still hold today, with one exception that I'll look at as soon as I've finished this post.