Right back since version 1.0, Pebble has been able to persist the list of referers and visited pages to text files underneath the blog so that you can get referer information for any point back in time after starting your blog. Recently there have been a few requests to improve the logging facilities. It seems that users would like to see who is linking to their blog entries, who is reading them and at what time of day they are reading them. If you have an Apache front-end and access to the logs then getting this information is trivial. Unfortunately this isn't the case for all of us and it's time for a rework.

The next version of Pebble (1.6) will have a completely reworked logging mechanism and all this information will be logged in the Combined Log File Format. This is the same format that is used in many webservers and supports all of this information. As a Pebble user, you'll be able to access it in the following ways through the web admin interface:

• Raw log file by day
• Raw log file by month
• Referers by day
• Referers by month
• Requests by day
• Requests by month
• Export/download all log files

From an implementation perspective, the logs will be decoupled from the way blog entries are stored on disk, which is good because currently requesting referers for a specific time period loads all blog entries in that time period. In addition to this, todays log will be cached and I'm carrying forward the notion of a background logging thread (writing in bulk to increase throughput) that was introduced in an earlier version. So there you have it - standard log files coming soon.

Responses[1]

Posted by Simon Brown on 20 August 2004 22:35:10 BST #