Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Source: The Shifted Librarian Last month I highlighted Dan Grigsby's code that notifies you via AIM when someone visits a specific post on your blog. It was interesting to continually get notifications throughout the day, but now Dan has updated that code to let you get the AIM name of the visitor if they provide it. While this is mostly just interesting on my personal site, this could be *very* interesting on my intranet and extranet. Instant messaging integration is going to get very interesting over the next few years. In terms of traffic patterns, though, Dan is also offering a new free service called Lumberjack. "There are a number of really good web access log traffic analysis programs out there. Programs like Webalizer, Analog and WebTrends provide great traffic analysis, tell you how people got to your site (i.e., referrer tracking), what they do when they're there, what OS and browser they use, and so on. These programs run on most any operating system. These are hard-core traffic analysis tools. The problem is that these programs require webserver access logs, and these logs are generally not available to bloggers unless they run their own webserver. This service solves this problem by creating access logs formatted identically to those found of webservers. Generate an HTML fragment using the form below, then paste this fragment into your blog entries. Each time someone visits one of these pages a log entry will be added to a logfile stored on this server. You can come here and download the logs whenever you like. Run these logs through any analysis program that supports the 'Combined Log' format (used by most Apache servers)." I'll try it out when I have a moment to add the code to my posts, but this highlights a point I make in my presentations about blogging - that a lot of the interesting innovation we're seeing on the web is coming from the blogosphere. Something about the combination of the collective and the personal is pushing the envelope. [The Shifted Librarian] 5:38:10 PM    trackback []     Articulate []