(UPDATE: Having woes with the Captcha. Argh. Have disabled comments till I can get it fixed. Sorry.... Thanks Judah for the heads up!)
(UPDATE2: Captcha Woes Fixed. Now using a new improved "Math" Captcha. Apologies for the mess!)
(UPDATE3: Pulled item 20. Stephen Turner gently corrected me that timestamps are daylight savings independent. I should know that! )

The Web Analytics Association (WAA) has recently released a document of 26 Standard Definitions (PDF) to "... Promote Consistency across the ... Web Analytics Community"

They are by no means a complete list, but you can read various reactions around the Web Analytics industry via Avinash, Judah and/or Robbin. All have a slightly different view on things. And to the best of my heresay knowledge, are all members of the WAA itself. I'm personally not a member, more due to slack/lazy inertia than a deliberate conscious decision to not join.

I finally had some time today to read the document in detail. As is natural with any new document, there are issues, minor or not. So being a good little bug reporter type, I thought I'd write 'em down. And then email the list through. But the list seemed to grow just a tad, and I figured that perhaps these concerns and issues could benefit from a public airing. Or at least, that I could be shot down publicly... Foot-in-mouth, just deserts et al. Pick one. Or three.

Notwithstanding the below (hopefully constructive) criticisms, this is a pretty good document! Really! It's way past time we did have a standard on what these terms mean in this industry.

Now I have had all too much experience with writing policy documents, was even Defence's representative on a Standards Australia committee. (Which sounds way more glamorous than it is. What's that? It doesn't sound glamorous? That's what I just said! ). So please forgive the anal retentiveness of what follows. I do mean this for the best! No particular order, though I have tended to start from the beginning of the document and gradually worked through to the end.

Just released Visitors 1.1 last night. Yay!
This includes a cleanup option to be able to cleanout dead records, as well as a couple of starting query options for long term data analysis. We found some fascinating information at work using this.
Have also created a SourceForge account for the project at long last. I figure it's got to be better for the long term options of the project.

Have just released v1.0 of visitors. A program for more accurately tracking visitor numbers to a website.
Only minor to trivial fixes. Stability seems good, so time for version 1!

All released versions of Visitors:

11-Aug-2005 visitors-1.1.tar.gz
07-Jul-2005 visitors-1.0.tar.gz
15-Apr-2005 visitors-0.9.7.tar.gz
14-Mar-2005 visitors-0.9.6.tar.gz
05-Mar-2005 visitors-0.9.5.tar.gz

Various bits of coding and documentation. Eventually.

AWFFull

A Webalizer Fork, Full o' features. Webserver log analysis.

DNSHistory

Store a history of DNS/Name changes from web log files.

Visitors

Process a web log file for visitor statistics.

GL NewsPicks

NewsPicks plugin/modification for Geeklog.

Process a web log file for visitor statistics

Latest is version 1.1 visitors-1.1.tar.gz

Description

visitors processes a web log file trying very hard to identify a single "person" as much as possible. This is typically achieved by use of either an identifying cookie in the log file; Or via the IP Address/Name & Browser ID combination.

Assumes that the logs being sent are already sorted into oldest --> most_recent date/time order.

A Berkeley Database is used to maintain visitor details between runs; as well as reducing the memory footprint within a run. All files are processed in the order specified.

visitors works best (currently only!) when the apache module "mod_usertrack" is enabled and a cookie entry stored in the resulting logfile.