$Id: README 451 2007-09-01 03:07:26Z steve $

                        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  01-Sep-2007
------------------------
This release announces v3.8.1-beta3

See the ChangeLog for more info, but not so briefly and in English, the
3.8.1-beta series has the following changes:

*  Big news is the inclusion of GeoIP capability
        Will compile in if found, but won't actively run unless set to.
        Uses same config file options as Geolizer.
*  Country Flags can be displayed with the country table.
*  German translation updates
*  Compilation fix for ./configure, resulting in ~ 13% speed improvement
*  Several bug fixes, including a nasty segfault
*  Updates to how GroupXXXX Config options are handled.
        This can have a *massive* speed increase if you use lots of
        GroupXXXX options.
*  3.7.2 is a fix only release. More segfault fixes, fixes to the i18n bits.
        See the ChangeLog for details
*  3.7.3 is a quick fix to remove nearly all translations for countries.
        It has been noted that several are incorrect. It was felt that no
        translation is better than a wrong one.
*  3.7.4 moves the graphs to using TrueType Fonts.
        This allows for UTF-8 translations to display correctly.


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 cleanup 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 reanalysed. For my own systems, I've reverted to the beginning
of 2005 and reanalysed 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.


THANKS
-----------
Some people have been most helpful with releasing AWFFull:
*  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.



spm@stedee.id.au

