Tracking Your Visitor's Footpath

Click to enlarge sample graph

How To Get It (A Very Short Cooking Recipe for the Technical Experienced User)

• Download, compile and install the "Visitors Web Log Analyzer" from   http://www.hping.org/visitors/ (the source code is free – you need a C compiler, or you have to pay for a precompiled Windows binary).
   
• Download and install the "Graphviz" software from   http://www.graphviz.org/. It's open source and there are precompiled packages for several operating systems available.
   
• You need the log files from your Website. The following examples are assuming the you have your downloaded logfiles gnu-zipped and named like www.20070923.gz (this may be different from website to website), residing in a subdirectory named logs on your computer.
   
• The following command line examples are from Linux. They should also work on Windows.
   
• zcat ./logs/www.*.gz | visitors - --all --trails --prefix http://www.ahnendaten.de --output html >report.html
  This call produces a web log analyzer report, like other log analyzer programs. The first part (zcat ./logs/www.*.gz |) uncompresses all g-zipped log files and sends it to the visitors software (see   Visitor's documentation). Change "http://www.ahnendaten.de" to your site's web address!
   
• If you have already unzipped logs, use
  visitors --all --trails --prefix http://www.ahnendaten.de --output html >report.html ./log/*.log
  instead.
   
• The following is now the first step to get the graph shown above: zcat ./logs/www.*.gz | visitors - --graphviz --trails --prefix http://www.ahnendaten.de --grep ahnen --exclude admin --exclude login --exclude logout --graphviz-ignorenode-google >mygraph.dot
  "ahnen" is the name of the website-subdirectory where the TNG installation resides. "admin" is the name of TNG's admin directory.
   
• Be patient, the computation can take several minutes...
   
• You have now a text file named mygraph.dot (it's a simple text file; the extension .dot has nothing to do with the .dot files from Microsoft Word!).
  To get a picture, run dot mygraph.dot -Tpng >mygraph.png
   
• Use batch files (Unix/Linux: shell scripts).