If your boss is awfully analytical, you'll be glad to know about AWFULL's web analytics capabilities. Blue GNU interviewed Steve McInerney, to find out how the project came about and what AWFFULL (A Webalizer Fork FULL of features) offers to the modern-day webmaster.

When and why was AWFFULL started?

September 2005 was the official 1st release of AWFFull. I'd started the patches to the original Webalizer, from which AWFFull is forked, about a year previously. The main "Why?" was to extend the 12 month limitation that Webalizer has. One thing lead to another and before I'd really noticed, I appeared to be "Shaving a Yak".
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that.html

It just seemed to snowball from there...

Where does the project stand at this point?

I'd have to say at the cusp of breaking away from being purely statistical like all other FOSS website analysers and heading into true Web Analytics territory. On the fly segmenting and industry standardised ratios to highlight insights. AWFFull can already be driven that way, but is harder and may involve multiple runs vs the commercial tools. And no pretty GUI either. :-)

Who are your primary users?

There are two types.
1. Sysadmins like myself. Folk who have a web stats/analytics problem to solve for their users.
2. The non-IT folk for whom the reports are generated.

My *goal* is to put powerful, but simple, analytics of websites in the hands of Mum's and Dad's who really don't want to know everything about this whole web thing. They just want to make their website better. The Web Analytics industry is still very much in the White Lab Coat
stage when compared with IT in general. I'd like to help drive the simpler side of it forward for the rest of us.

How many active developers currently work on AWFFULL?

Can I rephrase the question as it unintentionally demeans the work done by heaps of others. :-)
How many active PEOPLE currently work on AWFFull: No particular order.
* 2 Developers
* Around 5 or so patch submitters
* 1 Tester
* 1 Designer
* Several sole language translators
* And 3 folk whom I would regard as my externally invisible, support team. Idea Tasters if you will.

Some people fulfil multiple roles. Somewhere around 10-15 people in varying degrees of active engagement with the project as a whole.

How does AWFFULL compare (in your view) to other projects?

Early stages. Very early stages. Not in terms of code maturity or capability, more in terms of visibility and widespread usage. There's also a largish static inertia to, heh, *overcome* from the incumbent projects in the same space: before world domination beckons.

Can you give me any idea of how big and/or active the AWFFULL user community is?

Definitely less than 50 people I'd guess. Depends where you draw the line, but if you're talking active? Around 20-30.

What needs to be accomplished before the next release of AWFFULL?

I need to get off my backside and package it up. The code side is done, it's just the administration fiddle that remains.

What are the biggest obstacles the AWFFULL team faces in development?

Time. Sometimes you get heaps, often the more important things like family must and should take priority. Work is in there somewhere too. Just in case my boss and our clients ever discover and read this article....

Is there anything else about AWFFULL you think our audience should know?

Currently to drive AWFFull to do proper analytics, you need to do external segmenting. ie. Pre-filters with gawk or perl or egrep. So knowing this, don't just run AWFFull against your logs and walk away. Go back and look again. Strip out all the 'bots you can find. Use the
Analytic Ratios added in the latest version (v3.8.1 - still in beta!) to try and figure out why people are bouncing off certain pages. Is traffic from Google achieving goals more so than that from Yahoo!? Vice Versa?

Key Word/Phrase analysis? Do some phrases achieve better results for you than others? eg. Do people searching for "Blue Wibbles" buy more 'stuff' from your site than those searching for "Red Wibbles"; so what can you fix to make Red work better without impacting against Blue. And what happened to Green!?!!?

Make changes to your site based on the insights you gain: wash, rinse and repeat! And watch your site improve and YOUR users get happier! Or the filthy lucre roll in. Whatever. ;-)

Oh yes. You can easily substitute away from "AWFFull" with any one of several other Open Source Log Analysers in the above paragraph. They all do a pretty good job. And all have differing strengths and weaknesses. Pick the one that works best for you and learn how to drive it to achieve insights and hence improvements in your website!