I've been using webalizer for years for watching most of my critical stats. I'd like to move to something that will let me see trends, time spent on pages and other interesting things. I think mint looks good as well as a few other subscription and pay-for tools but is there anything that's really good and free that works on Apache logs?

Drupal is a very powerful Content Management System (CMS) that has a well-designed taxonomy module. Taxonomy is the system of categorization and classification of things. In Drupal's taxonomy, you can define multiple vocabularies and the terms in those vocabularies can have multiple sub-terms. This site is set up that way with the high-level terms being general concepts such as "Programming" and "Technology." The one thing I wanted that it did not do out of the box was to show sub-categories as an additional navigation menu when you clicked on a parent category. It's not to hard to implement if you know how. Read on for the code snippets.

If your movable type blog gets hit excessively by trackback spammers, you may find yourself unable leave trackbacks for yourself due to a "403 Throttled" error. This http response is from movable type in an effort to slow down mass trackback ping spammers. I will go over some quick fixes, some longer term fixes and some very technical info for those intending to modify their installation of MT to handle trackback ping spam better. This article will apply to MT3 and MT4.

Almost anyone can write little scripts to do simple tasks or write little code snippets that print hello world endlessly but to actually develop a really useful application requires a little more time and knowledge. I've put together a step-by-step guide for aspiring programmers to follow that should help fill in the gaps with their new programming venture.

Last week, Six Apart announced the release of Movable Type 4. MT4 is a major upgrade in that it adds many new features and supports a more robust templating system. This site is run by MT4 and has been upgraded from version 3.35 to use the new templates and features. (Edit - 2-25-2009 - this site is now running drupal 6.9) Upgrading the underlying system is fairly straight-forward, but getting all of your customizations moved into the new templates is very work intensive and requires a lot of research. I'll go over what I learned and did to successfully upgrade this site and hopefully save you some time.

In this article I go over step-by-step what's required to get your forum idea turned into a working web-based forum running on a linux-powered server using the domain name you chose. I have provided a real forum as an example at the end of this article (DIY Electric Car Forums) showing what I set up using the steps provided in this guide so you can see what your end result will be like.