Are you a blogger? If you are, you may be interested in the post I wrote today for 40tech.com on how to access your site’s log file. You can see who’s looking at your site, and what they’re reading, all in real time. You can also check out your error log to figure out why something on your site isn’t working. It’s pretty nifty, and it’s a good foray into accessing your site directly via the command line.

Here’s the article on 40Tech: How to See What’s Happening On Your Site in Real-time Using Your Log File

Also, I found a link that explains how to read the contents of the Log file. Some of it seemed obvious to me, like the numbers are the IP of the person checking out your site and the GET: postname.html is the page they’re looking at. But this was something I wouldn’t have intuited:

The sixth piece of information is a status code. This tells you whether the request was successful, or encountered some problem. Most of the time, this is 200, which means that the transfer was successful, and everything went well. Hopefully. I’m not going to give the whole list of the status codes, and what they mean. You need to look in the documentation for that. But, in general, a status code that starts with 2 was successful. Starting with a 3 means that the request was redirected somewhere else for some reason. Starting with a 4 means that the user did something wrong, and starting with a 5 means that the server did something wrong.

Good to know. Both articles are very easy to read and understand even for someone with absolutely no experience using the command line.