One of the things that I look for in a hosting service is access to raw access logs. There is no substitute for raw data when you really want to know what is going on. But the good folks at TextDrive provide Urchin, and Urchin just might be enough to change my mind.

Urchin would definitely be enough, if it just understood the nature of RSS. I recently added a filter to exclude my RSS feed from the statistics to get a better view of sessions. Unfortunately, that also removed my RSS feed from the hit count and bandwidth computation.

What I really need is for Urchin to understand RSS. To understand that 20 news aggregators pulling my RSS feed every hour represent 20 sessions, not 480. I’d settle for being able to exclude my RSS feed from the session report while retaining it for hit count and bandwidth.