Chebucto Community Net:
IP FAQs: URL Statistics: A Quick Guide

The CCN script urlstats allows you to find out how many document accesses (URL 'hits') a document (or directory; or several documents or directories) on the CCN has had over a certain time interval.

The basic syntax of employing this cgi-bin routine is:

http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/cgi-bin/urlstats?URL

Where URL = some URL on the CCN. For example to see how many document accesses the Culture Directory has had you would use:

http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/cgi-bin/urlstats?Culture

This gives a result like:

  Number of visits to main page of /Culture/

     * Yesterday: 8
     * This month: 46
     * Last month: 101

  Number of visits to URLs that match /Culture

     * Yesterday: 10155
     * This month: 87204
     * Last month: 221913
     _________________________________________________________________

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This URL can be an entire directory or a single page. You simply have to specify its pathway from the CCN root directory (i.e. from localhost/ccn/home).

You can also conjoin several directories or files together by using the | (pipe) element, i.e to find out the total number of hits in the Culture & Heritage Directories, one would use:

http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/cgi-bin/urlstats?(Culture|Heritage)

It's also possible to specify a particular month or day for which you wish to obtain information. For instance, to find out the number of document accesses in the Culture directory in March of 1999 one would use:

http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/cgi-bin/urlstats/Culture?DATE=1999-03

To specify a particular day, say April 30, 1999, the syntax is:

http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/cgi-bin/urlstats/Culture?DATE=1999-04-30

All these features can help you to get some sense of the usage of your website.

Remember that interpreting what URL hits mean is not a straightforward matter. A URL access is simply a record that someone requested that information. It does not tell you anything about where that access was from. Ten URL 'hits' could be from ten different people or ten requests from one person. If your site has ten documents and a user read them all, this will constitute ten URL hits if you are looking at the usage of your entire directory.

Also, if there are graphics in your site, and a graphical browser (like Netscape or Internet Explorer) requested them, their usage will also be added to the number of 'hits' your site has received. This is further complicated by the caching that browsers do, so that, depending on how this caching is set in a browser, multiple accesses to a single document may or may not count as multiple URL hits.

In conclusion, interpret these statistics with caution. They are, however, useful rules of thumb in terms of the traffic that your site is receiving.

For further questions on the use of this resource, EMail ip-help@chebucto.ns.ca

Christopher Majka

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