
                        Welcome to AWFFull!

                A Webalizer Fork, Full o' Features!


Webalizer is a great weblog analysis program but hasn't been going anywhere in
recent years. AWFFull takes that base and starts to fix the niggles and
annoyances and hopefully become a useful enhancement.

As a base, webalizer has a stated goal of producing web server analysis.
AWFFull on the other hand, will gradually focus more on the business
intelligence contained within those logs - and not specifically limited just
to web server logs. I have an interest in whole of site statistics, and that
is rarely contained solely in webserver log files. If you're keen to see where
I would like to take awffull, check out the TODO file.


Latest News  13-Dec-2008
------------------------
This release announces v3.10.2

v3.10.2 fixes a couple of critical bugs. See the ChangeLog for details.

v3.10.1 is principally an upgrade of the proect license from GPLv2+ to GPLv3+.
Plus some new flags have been imported.

See the ChangeLog for more info, but briefly and in English, v3.9.1 has
the following notable changes:

* The documentation has had a major rewrite and reorganisation. Is now split
    into two man pages: awffull.1 and awffull.conf.5
* The documentation source is now in DocBook XML
* The big feature add has been Segmentation. At this stage, purely by Country
    and/or Referring Host
* Various minor fixes
* Revisited Internationalisation - now use LANGUAGE to override - typically
* The default font used for the graphs has changed to "sans" from "Helvetica"

With AWFFull v3.9.1, the project managing infrastructure has moved to
Launchpad.  Probably the most obvious change will be the (gradual) migration of
bugs from the existing 'flyspray' system into Launchpad's bug tracker.


Support, Questions, Bugs
------------------------
With AWFFull v3.9.1 some of the project management infrastructure has
been migrated to Launchpad (launchpad.net). There are multiple reasons, and a
brief discussion was held on the maillist in early August 2008:
http://www.stedee.id.au/pipermail/awffull/2008-August/000760.html

This is not to suggest that the existing maillist and it's various uses are
being dismantled. From from it! Rather, processes like Bug Tracking;
Questions/Answers; Translations; and Source Code Control are now all hosted
via Launchpad.


NB! TrueType Fonts and Graphs with no text
------------------------------------------
This is largely a configuration of system problem. Make sure you are linked
against fontconfig and friends. Some distro's will link awffull against
cut-down GD libraries, and hence fonts don't work. YMMV!
See the INSTALL file for more details.


So what additions does AWFFull provide vs Webalizer?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
*  GeoIP IP Address lookup capability for greater accuracy with Countries.
*  The front page history can now cover more than 12 months. An included tool
    (awffull_history_regen.pl) should assist with the initial changeover.
*  Subtotals for each year can be displayed if requested.
*  The Top Right and Bottom Left corners not joining correctly have bugged me
    for a long time. That's now fixed.
*  All graphs are now resizable, rather than being a fixed size. The sizes
    are controlled within the config file.
*  Borrowing the algorithm from RRDTool, the Y-Axis grid lines are now more
    intuitive and far easier to read.
*  Added a few more pie charts.
*  There's been a few minor fixes to the overall look, including Stanislaw
    Pusep's Geolizer fixes for generating Volume listings in other than raw
    KBytes.
*  Much of the pattern matching has been moved to using the Perl-Compatible
    Regular Expression Library (PCRE). This has enormously simplified the code
    base, as well as enhancing the ability to deal with additional log file
    formats in the future.
*  Likewise, the date-time conversions are now handled by standard library
    calls. Various performance optimisations have meant a near zero impact on
    overall speed. Again the code is significantly simplified.
*  In addition to these back end changes, AWFFull now estimates the number of
    bookmarkings made within a site. This is calculated based on the known
    actions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, and hence is only a rough
    guide.
*  Pattern Matching improvements can results in speed increases of around 50%.
    YMMV.
*  A Performance Tips document has been added to the tarball: PERFORMANCE_TIPS.txt
*  404 Errors and the Referring URL can be displayed (off by default). This
    also includes an all 404 errors option, to display a separate page of all these
    errors.
*  CSS Style sheets have been incorporated to ease the use of personalisation.
*  With CSS incorporation, have been able to reduce and clean-up the HTML output.


WARNING!!!!
-----------
With version 3.01 of Awffull, the method for counting Referrals and User Agents
has significantly detoured from webalizer. Both are now counted via Pages and
not via Hits. This gives, IMHO, a far more accurate representation of the
breakdown between Agents and Referrals.

With version 3.4.1 of AWFFull, this also includes Countries.

Agents gets skewed by Spiders *only* accessing pages, vs regular browsers which
access everything.

Likewise, Referrals get skewed by search engine referrals via cached copies.

What this means is that any analysis part way through a month will be VERY
inaccurate. It is strongly recommended that for accurate representation the
current month is re-analysed. For my own systems, I've reverted to the beginning
of 2005 and re-analysed the lot.

To assist with this change, a warning message will be displayed when any older
versions of the current state file (webalizer.current, awffull.current) are
used. Also the header colours for those tables has also changed as a visual
clue.


LICENSING
-----------
As of v 3.10.1 AWFFull is release under the GPLv3+.
However there are gotchas to be aware of:
* The file: src/strlcpy.c is BSD license (via OpenBSD)
* The contents of the 'flags' directory are released under a Creative Commons
        license. See flags/README for details.
* AWFFull uses the GD Graphics library which has it's own requirements


THANKS
-----------
Some people have been most helpful with releasing AWFFull:
*  Benoît Dejean for a slew of patches, advice and ideas.
*  Robert Leftwich for much of the fiddly detail in cross verifying numbers
        generated.
*  Alexander Lazic who has provided a number of patches and ideas.
*  Patrick Ben Koetter for his assistance & patches with CSS, HTML
	simplification and ideas for XML'ing AWFFull output.
*  Benoit Rouits who provided the config colour selection patch.
*  John Heaton for various patches, bug reports and such.
*  Tobias Fonsmark for assistance with getting Domino support happening.
*  Serhiy Dubyk and Jani Ollikainen for translations.
*  Oden Eriksson for various patches, bug reports, translations and such.
*  Tony Breeds gets a big thanks for the awful name, and some patches.
*  Denise Callander for great help in steering many of the concepts that have
    and will wind up in AWFFull from a pure ownership/non-technical perspective.
*  And of course Bradford L. Barrett, and Stanislaw Yurievich Pusep for their
    original work with Webalizer and Geolizer.

Humble apologies to anyone if I've neglected to add you. Drop me an email and I'll update ASAP!


Feedback, Comments and Criticisms all three are most welcome.


Cheers!
- Steve
spm@stedee.id.au

