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#1 2005-09-18 18:21:41

LeeStewart
Archived Plugin Author
From: Boston, MA, US
Registered: 2005-07-25
Posts: 81
Website

hit_logger plugins alpha v0.9.06 - could use some testers.

The next version of my plugins (there are now three, sigh) is shaping up to be a bigger than originally planned. I pushed some of the features off from the v0.9.05 release so that the database wouldn’t change (requiring all hit info to be dropped – hard for people to test the new graph code when the database is empty).

Anyway, I’ve got 4-5 days of coding to get the next big chunks working and then I’d like to have a few “private alpha testers” before putting it up for the world to see. It’s not just an “install and let me know it works” sort of thing, detailed feedback is important. There are several specific things I need tested and will probably require a couple builds to get things stabilized.

In exchange you’ll get to see some of the super-secret features that aren’t documented anywhere, for example:

  1. Install the plugins and use the extensions tab to turn the “advanced view” on. If you had the incredible foresight to have already installed it, you can skip to step 2.
  2. Post a reply in this thread, with a link to your site. Click the link.
  3. View your logs – find the link and hover over the “forum.textpattern.com” referral.

I’ll also send happy karma thoughts your way…

Send me eMail if you’re interested in helping out. It would be nice if you told me which release of Textpattern and MySQL you’re using.

[Lee]


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#2 2005-09-18 18:58:38

LeeStewart
Archived Plugin Author
From: Boston, MA, US
Registered: 2005-07-25
Posts: 81
Website

Re: hit_logger plugins alpha v0.9.06 - could use some testers.

And of course that feature doesn’t work. Silly forum software, you have to do this:

  1. Install the plugins and use the extensions tab to turn the “advanced view” on. If you had the incredible foresight to have already installed it, you can skip to step 2.
  2. Post a reply in this thread, with a link to your site. Click here and find your link, then click it.
  3. View your logs – find the link and hover over the “forum.textpattern.com” referral.

Let me know it that was worth the effort…

[Lee]


Monkeys could have written a better post..

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#3 2005-09-18 20:00:10

thebombsite
Archived Plugin Author
From: Exmouth, England
Registered: 2004-08-24
Posts: 3,251
Website

Re: hit_logger plugins alpha v0.9.06 - could use some testers.

Very nice, though as I already get forum links I was able to go straight to step 3. ;) What does it mean if it says “not cached”?


Stuart

In a Time of Universal Deceit
Telling the Truth is Revolutionary.

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#4 2005-09-18 21:49:11

LeeStewart
Archived Plugin Author
From: Boston, MA, US
Registered: 2005-07-25
Posts: 81
Website

Re: hit_logger plugins alpha v0.9.06 - could use some testers.

thebombsite wrote:
I was able to go straight to step 3. ;) What does it mean if it says “not cached”?

It means that you skipped step two, which is quite important.

[Lee]


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#5 2005-09-21 02:37:14

LeeStewart
Archived Plugin Author
From: Boston, MA, US
Registered: 2005-07-25
Posts: 81
Website

Re: hit_logger plugins alpha v0.9.06 - could use some testers.

I’ve got a bulk of the new interface stuff done and it’s looking pretty good. There’s some rudimentary country detection code, so the main list of hits looks like this:

It’s getting to be a real tracker!

There are some things I won’t get in this build, for example I’m putting off client-side code (meaning JavaScript). It’s too tough and time consuming to test on multiple platforms. The user interface is shaping up, but I still have a ways to go before it’s as slick as some other product people keep telling me about.

Okay, back work for me…

[Lee]

Last edited by LeeStewart (2005-09-21 02:42:41)


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#6 2005-09-21 03:16:20

soulship
Member
From: Always Sunny Charleston
Registered: 2004-04-30
Posts: 669
Website

Re: hit_logger plugins alpha v0.9.06 - could use some testers.

It’s looking really great Lee. Good work. I will have some time next week and look forward to installing and testing this a bit.

Jamie

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#7 2005-09-21 05:54:47

akokskis
Plugin Author
From: Baltimore-ish, USofA
Registered: 2004-11-28
Posts: 230
Website

Re: hit_logger plugins alpha v0.9.06 - could use some testers.

Happy karma thoughts? Sounds like good times.

Link

Feedback so far: it’s really nice, clean interface. Looks really good so far.


My Photoblog, and my personal site. Got nav? ako_nav.
Thanks for taking the time to look…

— vc3 —

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#8 2005-09-21 06:48:21

colak
Admin
From: Cyprus
Registered: 2004-11-20
Posts: 9,007
Website GitHub Mastodon Twitter

Re: hit_logger plugins alpha v0.9.06 - could use some testers.

hi Lee,
was reading your .06 to do list
<blockquote>Tracking of spamming referrers (need to talk to zem about whack-a-moling this, also can I use txp_discuss_ipban as a basis?</blockquote>
I’m not certain of blocking IP addresses (although I do use my htaccess on certain IPs which are obviously repeatedly spamming). I do get a lot of spam refferrers but mostly they come from different IPs (although many times from the same site/page). I’m not sure that it can be done but giving the option to ban either a whole domain, a particular page or an IP would be a better/total solution.


Yiannis
——————————
NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.

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#9 2005-09-21 16:57:54

LeeStewart
Archived Plugin Author
From: Boston, MA, US
Registered: 2005-07-25
Posts: 81
Website

Re: hit_logger plugins alpha v0.9.06 - could use some testers.

colak wrote:
I’m not certain of blocking IP addresses

That’s the part of the architecture that I’m struggling with right now. The basic idea is that sometimes you get a hit on your site that you’d like to do “something” with. My original thinking was that you could see a hit in your log and click some stuff on the user interface to flag it:

  • Search Engine – If the referring URL is from a search engine domain, parse out the query and store it. This gets a little complicated since some search engines don’t have an explicit query string, it’s built into the URL. Some of these guys ignore robots.txt.
  • Spiders – If the user agent has the signature of a spider, flag it. It would be great to have parts of the site set up to return an error to prevent spiders from checking them.
  • Spammer – If the referring URL is blacklisted, flag it and ??? (forward somewhere?) I’m not really sure what to do with this. And should I use IP addresses in addition to the URL or instead of the URL? (the issue you mentioned)
  • 404 – If the local page wasn’t found, specify where you’d like the viewer redirected. Setting this per missing page would help a lot.
  • Redirect – If the local page matches a certain string, generically redirect. For example, my site used query strings for archives and they’re not currently flagged as 404s, so I can’t redirect from “/?link=2003-11-01&length=months” to something that’s more meaningful.

By default my plugin has some of these built in, but I can’t include every search engine/spammer or my files get too large. In fact I also need to let the user tell the plugin about unknown browsers and operating systems as well.

One of my problems is that I can’t get the string searching to work in a generic manner – looking for a string of “google” in the referring URL doesn’t work. I really need to use regular expressions, but that slows things down too much plus is hard for people to test. It’s easy to do something and then find out that you’re matching “mozilla compatible” browsers on accident.

You spend hours a day tweaking these hits and then what? Well your system is running better and giving you more accurate information. What about others? They’re probably getting unrecognized hits from the same search engine. Well, I’ve got a way of merging your data with the info on my server and then letting others download those updates.

Another complicatation – what if you want a little icon next to the hit so the IE logo appears next to that browser, Google icon next to that search hit, etc? I sort of borrowed some images for now, but need to figure out a proper solution…

Probably more info than you wanted to know :)

[Lee]


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#10 2005-09-23 02:32:49

rsilletti
Moderator
From: Spokane WA
Registered: 2004-04-28
Posts: 707

Re: hit_logger plugins alpha v0.9.06 - could use some testers.

Installed @ <a href=“http://textcastle.com”>Textcastle</a>

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#11 2005-09-23 10:49:20

alexandra
Member
From: Cologne, Germany
Registered: 2004-04-02
Posts: 1,370

Re: hit_logger plugins alpha v0.9.06 - could use some testers.

installed @ http://textpattern.kbbu.de

so far: i miss the % values for spiders, borwsers, operating systems…
other than that: GREAT WORK, Lee

Some questions:
  1. why are some IP´s highlighted in bold face?
  2. what is the difference between “spiders” and “searchengines” (to me in english spider and searchengine is the same)
  3. what/where do *Top Search Phrases and Top Search Words referr to?

Last edited by alexandra (2005-09-23 11:01:13)

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#12 2005-09-23 14:19:48

LeeStewart
Archived Plugin Author
From: Boston, MA, US
Registered: 2005-07-25
Posts: 81
Website

Re: hit_logger plugins alpha v0.9.06 - could use some testers.

alexandra wrote:
so far: i miss the % values for spiders, borwsers, operating systems…
other than that: GREAT WORK, Lee

Thanks, although I don’t know what you mean by “miss”. Are they not showing up?

  1. why are some IP´s highlighted in bold face?

The first time a visitor comes to your website, I bold the “who” column, then all hits after that are normal font and will have a ‘+’ in the flags column – basically the bold ones are counted as “unique visitors” to your site. You can turn on the advanced view and hover over the plus sign to see how long they read the previous page.

I’ve made this a little better in the current release, I use a minus sign for a unique hit and a plus for the duplicates. When you hover over those symbols it’ll tell you how much time the viewer spent on that page (instead of the previous page).

By the way, I bold the “page” column if it’s a 404 and the latest version also italicizes the “page” column for file downloads. The “referrer” column is bold when the hit is coming from a search engine.

  1. what is the difference between “spiders” and “searchengines” (to me in english spider and searchengine is the same)

A spider is the software that search companies use to get the HTML from your website (some people call these programs ‘bots’ or ‘robots’). It’s an automated thing that goes through each page and indexes all the data for use by the search system. Maybe this won’t be so confusing when I have the screens translated into other languages.

Basically I break these into categories so I can tell that I’ve had 82 hits from people searching and 635 hits from spiders (which I don’t really care about).

  1. what/where do *Top Search Phrases and Top Search Words referr to?

When someone searches for a phrase in a search engine and then clicks the results to go to your site, I capture that search string. I store it as a full phrase and also chop it into individual words. The list you see is the 10 most common uses of these phrases and words.

At some point I want to also track the search strings that people type when doing a local search with the Textpattern search box. It’s a low priority since I don’t let people search my site that way.

Thanks for testing!

[Lee]


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