Microsoft have played a bit of a blinder. I’ve always found it a nightmare to set up ASP.net applications on IIS. Even getting PHP up and running and playing nice on IIS can be an absolute nightmare at times. No more however. If you are running IIS 6 or 7 then it is well worth your while installing Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer.
At the moment I’m using version 2 which is in beta but it is fine for production use albeit with one very unusual and weird quirk. If you try to install a package it will throw a wobbly if you are not in the Pacific, US and Canada time zone. So change the time zone before installing a web app and don’t forget to change it back once you are finished.
Rather than wax on about it myself I will just rehash Microsoft’s blurb:
The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes it simple to download, install and keep up-to-date with the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer. In addition, install popular open source ASP.NET and PHP web apps with the Web PI.
If you have to administer or are setting up an IIS server then it’s an essential install!
I have somewhat of an obsession of poring over my logfiles. Whichever PC or laptop I happen to be using at home will always have an ssh session open in the background with a tail of my reverse proxies logs whizzing by. But when it comes to running reports there are plenty of options. Most of which I have used and two days ago I discarded them all for new alternative.
Up until recently I was using both Google Analytics and Woopra. They both pretty much report the same information with just a different look. One issue I noticed with both was performance. Occasionally a page would stall or load slowly while the client connected to one of my sites was waiting to load the script from either Google or Woopra. And as everybody could testify, waiting for a page to load – even if it is just for a couple of seconds – can be frustrating.
In addition to Google Analytics and Woopra I also used AWstats to parse the log file. However that would be fine for one site but when running multiple sites it can become a bit of a pain as each site has its own report. Ideally what I was looking for was something more realtime like Google Google Analytics and Woopra. And what I found was Piwik!
Although it is in early beta it was a doddle to setup. I created a new domain and set it up to accept stats from each of my own sites. Each site gets its own dashboard. Once you setup a site you get a little bit of code to insert somewhere on your pages.
For my WordPress powered sites I did this by simply inseting the script into the themes footer.php and for my primary site powered by MediaWiki it was a similar process. Although once I have everything set up I noticed that there is a WordPress plugin available.
I already mentioned it is in beta so there are a few quirks but overall it is a nice piece of software and is running rather well for me.
Screenshot from Piwik homepage.
The man and his dog on the street probably knows already but Sun Microsystems have bought MySQL.
Match made in heaven if you ask me.
http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/sun-acquires-mysql.html/
