Web Of Accesses
Web Of Accesses is a WWW access counting program. It was
created out of my frustration with other available
WWW access counting/statistics programs. All were either hard to
use, slow, far too verbose, or gave "uninteresting" numbers (for
example bytes transfered/hour -- most people don't care.) WOA
limits itself to answering the two basic questions:
- How many times have documents been accessed?
- Who has accessed them?
In addition, WOA:
- Exploits the power of WWW browsers to display access reports.
- Runs reasonably fast, even with medium to large log files.
- Is written in Tcl
and C, and is easily customizable.
The basic idea is to display accesses like the UNIX program du
displays disk usage, and then use hypertext links to chanlikege
directories or to display domain usage. To see this in use see www.lbl.gov's access
counts.
If woa.cgi is called with no arguments, it produces an index
of the available counts. (For example, see www.lbl.gov.) Selecting
a count set produces a directory report for the root of the document
tree.
Menu Items
Each of the reports has a series of menu items at the top:
- UP DIR brings up
the directory report for the parent directory.
- UP DOMAIN brings up the domain report for the parent
of the current domain.
- DOMAIN brings up the domain report for the current
directory.
- DIR switches back to the directory report from a
domain report.
- OPTIONS brings up the options page.
- HELP brings up this page.
The Directory Report
The directory report (see example) lists
the directories and documents served from your site. The documents
are ordered from the most heavily accessed to the least. Each
line of the report contains the following links:
- The number in the Rank column brings up a directory
report for the directory. This will not be a link if the
item is not a directory.
- The number in the Count column brings up the domain
report for the item.
- The URL to (and sometimes the title of) the
Document/Directory.
The Domain Report
The domain report (see example)
can be accessed by clicking on a Count column, or by clicking
on the Domain menu item. This is similar in structure to the
directory report, except that it lists the number of hits from the
top-level domains. Each line contains the following:
- The number in the Rank column brings up the domain
report for the sub-domain. For example, clicking on the US
Government (gov) line gives a breakdown for all sites
*.gov (see example).
- The domain name is highlighted if WOA knows about a WWW
server for that domain.
Setting Options
Various options can be set through by clicking on the OPTIONS
button. The form can also be accessed by appending ?so=1 to
the URL to woa.cgi, as in http://www.lbl.gov/wwwstats/woa.cgi?so=1.
The options listed here can also be set by appending the 2-letter
variable name, an =-sign and the value of the option in the
standard URL encoding way (mostly be sure to replace spaces with
+'s) to the woa.cgi URL.
- Database (db):
- Sets the WOA database. latest means the most
recent database available.
- Mininum Count (mc):
- Items with less accesses than this number will not be
displayed.
- Maximum Number of Items (mx):
- Display at most this number of items. Set to -1 if you want
all items displayed.
- Averaging Period (av):
- Sets the averaging period. WOA understands the units
(or any abbreviation) years, months,
weeks, days, hours,
minutes, and seconds. The units defaults to
days.
- Directory (di):
- Show accesses from this directory (and sub-directories).
Empty means from the top-level directory.
- Domain (do):
- Show accesses from this domain (and sub-domains) to
documents in the current directory. top means from
the top-level domain.
- Use Tables (tb):
- Use HTML 3.0 tables. WOA automatically uses tables
with Mozilla 1.1 and Arena clients.
Getting WOA
WOA is available free of charge from
overload.lbl.gov.
WOA requires:
See the README included with the WOA tar file for more
information. WOA was developed on my Linux
box and tested on www.lbl.gov running Solaris
2.3. It has also been installed on Ultrix and SunOS 4.1.x machines, and
should be fairly portable to other Unix boxes. For a detailed list of
changes to WOA see the ChangeLog.
WOA reads the common
logfile format and should be compatible with nearly all the HTTP
servers out there. WOA need not run on the same machine
that the logfile is from, so a Unix machine running WOA could
serve statistics for a Mac HTTP server.
Other Access Statistics/Counting Programs
This is a list of some WWW statistics programs. If you know of any
others send me some mail at the address below.
- wusage produces a graph of WWW usage (# of hits and a
pie-chart of the largest top level domains.) More information
is available here.
- wwwstat is a widely used WWW statistics program. See
here.
- gwstat, which graphs the output of wwwstat. See
here.
Sam Shen <slshen@lbl.gov>
Last modified: Tue Sep 19 00:49:07 1995