A couple of weeks ago I was looking at the Stone Steps Webalizer website stats and noticed a sharp drop in visits. Usually that would mean that there was something wrong with the infrastructure, but taking a closer look at the server and the network I couldn't find anything that would point to the problem. The next day was similar, which made me wonder what kind of a world event has happened that drew traffic away off my site.

Today I figured out that this world event was nothing else but the release of the next version of the original Webalizer. The new version, 2.20.01, has a few security fixes and a number of new features, some of which inspired by various Webalizer forks, including Stone Steps Webalizer:

• MaxMind's GeoIP support
• Multi-year history
• IIS (W3C) log file support
• DNS improvements (CacheIPs and CacheTTL)
• Query strings support (StripCGI and SearchCaseI)
• Disable aliasing the default index HTML file
• Configurable graph component colors
• Some HTML improvements (e.g. adding the lang attribute)
• Support for spaces in group configuration options
• Support for case-insensitive configuration values
• Country flag support in the Country Report

Some of the new features are fairly interesting and worth considering for Stone Steps Webalizer some time down the road.

• bzip2 compressed log files (.bz2) support
• IPv6 support
• Support for log files larger than 2GB (LFS)
• Increased size of most internal counters to handle larger sites
• Unconditionally-generated summary report (index.html)
• Ability to control links in the top referrers table
• Support for counting pages matching the criteria as just files
• Prefix-based page identification

I must say that I was quite surprised to see another release of The Webalizer, which, incidentally, cost me a few downloads this month. However, I'm glad the original Webalizer was revived - this means there will be more Webalizer users and some, eventually, will be looking for an alternative implementation. Go, Webalizer, Go!