·:[ Jason On A Shtick ]:·
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Remember the good ol’ days when your stock installation of RedHat Linux (back when it was free, mind you, before the days of Fedora) included Webalizer?  Right out of the box, you could see some fancy graphs of your web site traffic.

These days, you need to throw a lot more analytics at your log files and AWStats delivers.  Most Linux distros have a packaged version of AWStats now, but I’ve been using it since it was a wee little tarball on SourceForge.  It can process log files of varying types including www, ftp and mail.  It spits out a really nice looking page of statistics organized into sections such as hour/day/month breakdowns, referrers, navigation stats and so on.

Here is a screenshot (click for larger version) but the AWStats SourceForge page links to a live demo that is much more interesting.

A fairly simple configuration file allows you to set up options on how to process your logs and includes niceties like log file format definition and host aliases to track.  There are several useful plugins for AWStats including UserInfo to show information about the authenticated users that are viewing your site and GeoIP which charts hits to your site by country based on IP addresses.  It even comes with a JavaScript file that you can include in your site pages to gather additional statistics on browser clients, a la other analytics services such as Google Analytics.

Bottom line: in a fairly short time, you can produce some really useful statistical information about the traffic to your sites with AWStats.

High definition TV has ruined me.  Jenny calls me an “HD bigot” because I refuse to watch things that are not in HD.  I’ve even tried to convince Lindsay that she should be enjoying her favorite Nickelodeon shows in 1,080 lines of goodness on NickHD and not on the regular channel, but she doesn’t seem to mind SD quality.  Perhaps that is because she rarely sits still to watch the TV and is bouncing around the room the whole time, but I digress.

When Lindsay was little, I shot a lot of footage of her with a standard definition video camera that used MiniDV media.  Using a number of software titles over the years (I finally settled on Adobe Premiere Elements), I could produce a pretty good quality DVD.  Even when viewed on an HDTV, it looked nice as long as you set the TV not to stretch the 4:3 aspect ratio footage to fit the screen.

Nearly three years ago, I built a new PC with a Blu-ray burner.  I planned to go all Blu-ray all the time and crank out home videos in stunning HD quality.  However, I was slow to get this scheme going for several reasons.  For starters, ours was the only house I knew of with a Blu-ray player, so the only people watching HD videos of us would be, well, us.  That wasn’t going to satisfy grandparents and others who wanted to see Lindsay on demand.  Second, HD video cameras were really expensive, so I couldn’t justify the cost.  And finally, YouTube happened.  I found that I could fairly quickly cut, upload and share videos that way, even in better than SD quality.

Well, this year for my birthday, I got an HD video camera – a Canon Vixia HF S30 along with a Canon DM-100 directional microphone accessory – seriously, check out the audio quality from this microphone in a big, echoing gymnasium.  Using that footage from this new camera, I have finally burned my first Blu-ray (again using Premiere Elements) and it looks fabulous.  HD fabulous.  Better late than never!

I did use my Mac to create a standard definition DVD of that same footage and also to upload it to YouTube as you see it there.  There’s no Blu-ray burning on a Mac, but I wanted to give iMovie and iDVD a shot.  I give them both high marks – in fact, most all of the videos I’ve uploaded to YouTube so far were produced in iMovie and I’ve been using iDVD to make discs to hand out to others.  Eventually, I’ll have to decide if using both is worth the effort – I could of course do it all from the PC alone.

Here’s a few musings on things that I’ve learned on this adventure:

• By default, you are not watching HD on YouTube.  When you watch a YouTube video, look at the little box in the bottom right corner that has a number like 360p.  Click there to switch to the HD version of the video or at least a higher quality, if available.
• “I don’t need Blu-ray, I can watch my HD videos on YouTube with my YouTube-aware HDTV or HD TiVo!”  Really?  Most appliances with a YouTube interface do not stream the HD versions of the videos and do not provide control over what comes down – even Blu-ray players that can connect to YouTube.  So good luck!
• Old Blu-ray players really suck.  My original player is a Sony BDP-S300 – it takes forever to boot and you have to manually update the firmware by downloading the update, burning it to a CD and feeding it to the player.  And yes, you do need to keep the firmware up to date if you want to have any shot at watching newer commercial Blu-ray discs on it.  We just got a second Sony BDP-S580 that has wi-fi to download updates and tells you when one is available.  It is as snappy as any standard DVD player, has built in Netflix, YouTube (though not HD!), etc.
• Old DVD players can also suck.  It used to be that your big choice was whether to burn on +R or -R discs, where -R was more compatible with older players.  But I’ve seen some -R discs burned via iDVD have some minor issues on older players (hence the second Blu-ray player mentioned above).