[ic] Usertrack questions

[Mike Heins]

Quoting Ian Riddler (ian at griffler.co.nz):
> Hi guys,
> I'm wanting to dig into the usertrack file to get some usable statistics.
> Things like most viewed products (What are people looking at?), and Items
> added to carts (What are peopel thinking of buying?)
> 
> I have a couple of questions so far.
> 
> First, am I right in assuming the file is a pure log file, IC doesnt' use it
> for anything itself?

Yes.

> I'm thinking of doing log rotation on the file, but don't want to break
> anything !

You won't.

> 
> Secondly, where an entry session details has nsession before the IP, does
> that mean this is a robot?

Yes.

> I'm making a pretty big assumption that all real users get session ID's, and
> robots don't.
> If I can be sure nsession entries denote robot activity, then I'll drop
> those lines out of the stats.
> 
> Thirdly, I'm going to write this in python, since most perl has no more
> meaning to me than the scratchings of a spider that's walked through an
> inkwell.

Boo, hiss....8-)

> It'll require shell access and cron access.
> Given that, is anyone else interested in seeing this sort of functionality
> once I'm done?  (Or helping me with it?)

If you go to 

    http://yourcatalog.tld/cgi-bin/yourcat/admin/trafficstats

there is a program which does some stats of sorts. It is not linked in
to the admin because it has not received the type of attention it needs,
and because it is unusable for large log files. (The whole reporting
script was done in a couple hours, and no one ever wanted to spend the
bucks/time to make it better.)

The neatest thing about the UserTrack stuff is that it outputs headers
that you can use in web statistics programs to do analysis. I believe
the output was designed for use with ShopSuxess, and maybe Racke has
some more input on how it is used there.

Personally, I would think the best thing that can be done with
statistics reporting on IC is to make a log file entry that can be
analyzed by a statistics program that is designed for that. If you
emulated an HTTP common log format, and put some data in where the
Browser normally goes and search terms where the Referer field goes, you
could get some interesting displays from Webalizer or Analog.

-- 
Mike Heins
Perusion -- Expert Interchange Consulting    http://www.perusion.com/
phone +1.513.523.7621      <mike at perusion.com>

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
-- Wernher Von Braun