Just as a quick summary of my NeoTracked pages - it seems there has been something like
1757 Distinct visitors since Sun May 20 00:01:28 CDT 2012 which have accounted for 12215 served pages.
... Elmer has the details. |
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The NeoTrack feature of NeoWebScript was added to provide users with a way to track visitors as they move around a site. An added benefit is a way to count distinct visitors, rather than simply number of pages served. A visitor is identified by his IP number. A variable/selectable timeout period is used to determine if a previously seen IP is the same or another visitor. This is certainly not perfect, but my experiments so far suggest that it works pretty well. You can view an example report or, for even more insite, view the report's source. Also, you may take a look at the documentation that exists.
The report page contains a form to allow you to set various report restrictions - like the number of visitors to report or a search term indicating that you only want to see visitors who came from - or visited - certain pages. The form now supports the use of multiple search terms that will be logically ANDed and/or ORed together (see 6-20-96 change report below). So, if you want to see all visitors who came from either Yahoo or Lycos - you can enter "yahoo lycos" as the search terms - (quotes for clarity only - you don't enter quotes).
Because the NeoTrack feature records a fair amount of data, the datafile must periodically be reset. Unfortunately this causes the loss of some information about distinct visitors. Also, there is not yet a report showing a daily history of the number of distinct visitors and their browser classes. To address this - in at least a small way - I have added a new counter named visitors and tied its counting to recognition of distinct visitors. You can now see a daily history report of the number of distinct visitors to my site in the named counter history report demo by looking at the visitors counter. If you would like to tie a named counter to the NeoTrack feature, try using something like...
if {[neotrack]} {incr_nc visitors}
...where visitors is the name of the counter you want to use to track distinct visitors.
There are also several support and Maintenance pages available for your review/info. Since the visitor file can become quite large, especially for active sites, you might want to occasionally delete older visitor traces from the file. You can view the source of a page used to accomplish this cleanup. It askes you to select the number of hours of data that should be kept and deletes all data older that your selection. (the followup page's source is also available.)
Also, the NeoTrack report page implementation keeps a file that lists all of the previously seen IP numbers that could not be translated into system names. This file is used to reduce the time spent trying to translate IPs that we already know can't be looked up. This list can, also become large - and sometimes, an IP that had been untranslatable might become translatable. To aid in maintanence of this file, have included the source for a small maintenance page that can be used to delete all entries from the unknown-IP file.
The NeoTrack facility is a Work In Progress and it will be changing over the next few weeks. This demo is provided only to allow you to see the current progress and to spur ideas for improvements.
Change History:
- 9-20-96 - hav: Modified the report format to have one row per visitor instead of several visitors per row in cols. - Also, allows selection of a particular NeoTrack datafile.
- 6-22-96 - hav: Several modifications were made in this pass. 1) DNS lookup of visitor IP numbers has been made optional. This can add noticable time to report generation. 2) The report will use specified cell-background colors for cells based upon which (local) page that each visitor enters onto. In the example, I use one color for my bonsai pages and another for my neowebscript pages. A default for all other pages is also provided.
- 6-20-96 - hav: Added support for multiple search terms to be logically ANDed and/or ORed together. Entries must be separated by whitespace. Two entries separated by only whitespace will be logically ORed. Entries separated by " + " will be logically ANDed (quotes for clarity only - you don't enter quotes). Search terms are processed from left to right - there is not currently any support for parenthesized precedence.
- 5-26-96 - hav: Changed over to visrep4 - added 1st path URI to the standard report. Also added ability to select visitor paths to be displayed based on where they came from - for example, to see only those visitors who came from YAHOO, I could select the From radio button and use "yahoo" as the selection criteria. Still can select based on the presence of a specified URI (or partial URI) in the path. Now, you may prepend an "!" to the selection string for not those...like if I want to the the last 50 visitors who did not visit the icon collection - I could select "!tobic" and re-index.
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