Since we setup the new servers at CeDiS, we track our usage stats. In this blogpost, I will give some technical details, discuss some conceptual issues and finish with some mathematical remarks.

Technical details

We run Apache as a web server. The logs are analyzed and aggregated with awstats. Awstats also takes care of separating “real users/readers” from “machine readers” (bots). Including the bots would artificially inflate our reader numbers, so it is good to exclude them.

Cumulative downloads for all published books until 07/2105

In the past, we tracked access with a spreadsheet, but we now use an automated routine which parses the awstats output, aggregates access data per book and produces graphics for each book and then again for all books combined (using python, beautiful soup and matplotlib). Continue reading →