I have been using this for a while, GoAccess is a wonderful little tool to automate the parsing. Highly recommend to those who prefer the old-school approach towards web analytics.
I started running goaccess on the reverse proxy in front of computer.rip and some other sites just a few weeks ago... it has answered basically every question I've wanted from simple website analytics and it was very fast to set up and very response. Just a great tool all around.
Access logs are almost useless for analytics these days... all they give you is the URL that was visited and some extremely rough idea what OS and browser the client is using (UA parsing is a hellhole).
You don't get any more detailed information (e.g. device class, screen size/orientation) from analytics logs.
Also, if you're using one of the free hosting providers (GH Pages and the likes) you're not even going to get access logs.
I wonder if you could use CSS media queries to collect additional data about device characteristics, by linking to different URLs at different breakpoints?
Like a breakpoint for portrait mode would set the background of something to an image that's just a 1x1 pixel. So when that resource is accessed, you know the request came from a device in portrait.
I guess it depends on how different browsers decide to access resource urls in CSS files. If a browser just downloads everything first, and then processes the media queries, then it wouldn't work.
> Parse your server's access log file. The way it had been done for decades. "Analog" was popular then, Should be better options now.
It depends how much data you want. Google Analytics can give you all sorts of juicy privacy-invading (but totally fine because its aggregated) data about your users which you won't get parsing the servers access log.
