Using Web Server Logs to Improve Site Design
This is the web page to accompany my presentation at ACM SIGDOC
98. At present it isn't elegant design, but I wanted to start making
material available.
The Paper
Using
Web Server Logs to Improve Site Design
This is the text of the paper as it appears in the proceedings.
It was converted automatically to html by Word. As usual the result
is readable but not asthetic. Note this paper is covered under the ACM copyright policy.
References
Further sources on log formats and analysis programs.
- A good set of links to log analysis software, much of it free, is found at:
http://www.101code.com/cgilinks/cgi_logs.html.
- A very complete list of analysis programs is at http://www.uu.se/Software/Analyzers/Access-analyzers.html
- Marketwave sold a number of web analysis programs in a well
done output format. Their web site has disappeared
- A more detailed description of common web log formats was formerly
found at
http://webgroup.uu.net/webreporter/appb.htm but has disappeared.
- A list of log analysis software is presented by Sun
Microsystems is available at
http://www.sun.com/950901/webstats/.
Be careful, there seems to be no critical analysis, so this may
just be a banner exchange page (i.e. you show people ours and
we'll show people yours.) Note that this page has no author.
- An excellent article giving a more scholarly overview of
network logging activities is the 1986 paper: "Complementing
Surveying and Demographics with Automated Network Monitoring," by
Marc Abrams and Stephen Williams of the Department of Computer
Science at Virginia Tech. This paper includes a good bibliography
(mostly available electronically) and an appendix on log formats.
Software
Soon there will be links here to take you to the software that I
use to extract parts of the log for analysis. In fact it was "done"
but I just wanted to add a few "improvements." Boy, as long as I have been
programming, I should know better. Any way as soon as it works again it will be here.
Late Breaking News
A working version of the software is here. Get the Software (Windows) and what little Documentation exists.
The present form of the documentation well illustrates why the mission of
SIGDOC is so important. Look for improvements real soon now.
Transparancies
I have the transparancies used in my talk here.
they are in Word for Windows format.