January 2001

Excerpt from:

[Newswire Online Extra Logo]

Number 58 (Update of Volume 6, Issue 1)

Extra-special Web tool, free: Analog/iX

By Ron Seybold, The 3000 NewsWire editor

We were excited when we got the news that Andreas Schmidt had ported the Analog Web tool to MPE, mostly because it proves the computer is becoming a real choice for Web services. Analog, you see, is the leading choice for tracking the contents of Web server logs, and you'd hardly need it if the HP 3000 wasn't racking up Web traffic. Schmidt said he's ported the software, absolutely free, because "For MPE/iX such tools may become more important in the future HPe3000 world. It is designed to be fast and to produce attractive statistics." The engineer who delivered the Ploticus graphics program he wrote about in September and October issues, Schmidt has a Web page at http://www.hillschmidt.de/gbr/analog.htm that provides e3000-ready code and installation instructions.

The program's creators have delivered a tool that "allows Webmasters to take an incomprehensible list of traffic data and create intelligent, comprehensible and very useful - from a site marketing and planning point of view - reports that anyone can understand," according to one online review. "Wading through such a file by hand is pointlessly time-consuming, which is why log file statistics packages exist." About one in four Webmasters use Analog, which takes raw log files and creates reports showing the number of unique visitors per day, the number of page impressions, which files were downloaded (and how many times), the type of browser and operating system used , CGI command arguments, host names and/or IP addresses and more. Reports can be tailored to suit the user, and created in HTML, ASCII or machine-readable output.


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