Apache logs are a great resource for getting information about who's coming to your website and what their looking at, but, come on - who actually can read through them without getting anything more out of it than a headache? Well, that's where Builder.com comes in.

In their latest, Gather Web server stats with a custom PHP app, they show you how to create a simple PHP script to parse your Apache logs. Basically, you tell it what file to look for, it grabs those lines out of the Apache log file and write that information to a custom log file. They then suggest a few programs to take this custom log and make it "pretty" and human-readable (such as Webtrends, Analog, and Webalizer).

This script is nice if you're looking for one specific file in your logs, but doesn't really give you much in the way of overall visitor interest. That would be better created by running on of the above programs on your whole log...