Customising BBClone
There any many tools which can be used for monitoring website log access statistics. My weapon of choice is BBClone. This PHP web based counter is about as good as it comes when you don't have direct access to your Apache Server log files.
All you need to do is add a small snippet of PHP code to each of the pages you wish to monitor and then the BBClone program does the rest
Personally I found a couple of things in the BBClone initial setup that I didn't like, the first being the fact that it separates all keywords out into individual words whereas I prefer to see what key phrases are being used, for example "customised bbclone" appears as two separate phrases "customised" and "bbclone". After a length of time it becomes difficult to identify which specific phrases are sending traffic to your site.
And so to the solution ... Changes were implemented on BBClone version 0.4.6a
In your bbclone/lib/ directory open up file 'referrer.php' and amend line 99 to:
$word_sep = array( "+", "/");
Upload the changes to your server and hey presto it should now be working to display the key phrases instead of the individual words.
If you want to change the wording on the BBClone Global Stats page then amend 'bbclone/language/en.php'. I amended it from 'Keywords' to 'Search Terms' which was more appropriate after the change I had made.
Another thing which I don't like about the initial installation of BBClone is that the Browser Stats don't display which specific version of browser was being used particularly for Internet Explorer and Netscape. To resolve this issue I had to make some amendments to the 'bbclone/lib/browsers.php' and 'bbclone/show_detailed.php' files to separate out the different versions of each browser. I haven't fully tested that this is working 100% yet so come back in a few weeks and I'll hopefully have the files available for download.
I'll also be providing a simple authentication script for password protecting your version of BBClone.
Best Wishes, Gary - 25 June 2005
