Thankfully that is not necessary in most cases, since most visitors automatically provide your site with basic information about where they came from, how they found your site and what sort of computer they are using during this visit. These data are called web statistics. The information is stored in a special file called a raw web log. A raw web log is essentially a text file with information about every person or machine that visited your site and what they requested in the order those requests were made. This file can grow to be quite large and very difficult to interpret. The average raw web log contains entries that look something like this:

111.111.111.111 ‑ ‑ [31/Oct/2005:12:22:57 ‑0500] "GET /gallery/download/1000/movie.zip HTTP/1.0" 200 105493 "http://domain.com/gallery/download/1000/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98)"

In the above example, 111.111.111.111 is the IP address of the user that made this request followed by the date and time of...