AXS Visitor Tracking

AXS is a Perl CGI script that you install on your web server. The script records visits to your site through a block of HTML and Javascript code that you must embed in all of your HTML pages.

When people visit the pages where you've pasted the special tracking codes, AXS records the visitor's IP address and browser type. It also records the URL that was visited, and the referring URL that sent the visitor to your site (i.e., a link or search results page).

The visitors to your site do not see any evidence of the tracker -- there is no required visible image or link that you have to display.

AXS does not analyze your standard web server logs -- instead, it builds its own log based on the traffic it detects from the HTML snippets you've pasted into your HTML pages. Traffic analyzers that use standard server logs are much more efficient than AXS.

AXS is pretty inefficient. It is suitable for low-traffic sites receiving a few hundred hits per day (if logs are stored for months), or sites receiving a few thousand hits per day (if logs are stored for days). For high-traffic sites, or for cases where you want to analyze years' worth of data at once, AXS is not the right tool for the job.

AXS resides entirely on your server, unlike common remotely-hosted trackers. This means you need to be able to install and maintain a CGI script. You need to be hosted on a CGI-capable web server.

AXS does not set cookies to track your visitors. Thus, it can only count raw page views -- it cannot track unique visitors, repeat visitors, number of pages viewed per visitor, or neat things like that.

It'll keep you from getting bored with your own web page
Apathy is the webmaster's worst enemy. AXS provides the essential dynamic content that keeps you coming back. Which of my links are the most popular? What search terms do people type in to get to my page? Are people from fbi.gov scanning my site? Now you'll know, with more information arriving every minute.

Because it's worthy
You have control of eighteen graphing options and five filtering methods. But AXS doesn't overwhelm you with pure information - short browser names, abbreviated referrers, and by-file filtering can turn a one megabyte log file into exactly the page-full of information you were looking for.

Do it because it's free
We at Fluid Dynamics have better things to do than charge you for code. Take advantage of this! Future scripts-in-the-works will not have this valuable feature... ;)