Date: Mon, 04 Nov 1996 23:54:28 GMT Server: NCSA/1.5 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 09:47:41 GMT Content-length: 3643 Statistics for pages on www.cs.wisc.edu

Statistics for pages on www.cs.wisc.edu

As of July 1995 users on the departmental computers can receive weekly statistics outlining how many times their World Wide Web pages were accessed and what other pages on the Web contain links to theirs.

To receive a statistics report, a file called ".statinfo" should be created in your WWW directory (~username/public/html/). (For projects that have their own aliases in the server's configuration files, put the .statinfo file in the directory pointed to by the alias.) This file should contain a list of addresses, one per line, to whom the statistics should be mailed. This is similar to a .forward file, except that the address must be a valid internet mailing address, not a program or file. The statistics will be sent to each person on the list every Friday night, shortly after midnight.

The statistics file will look something like this:


From: www@lucy.cs.wisc.edu
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 95 05:08:46 -0500
To: keeper@lighthouse.caltech.edu
Subject: WWW Page Statistics (www.cs.wisc.edu)

The following is a list of relative World Wide Web URLs for files 
accessed in the past week and located under the directory

/u/k/e/keeper/public/html

Each URL is followed on the same line by the number of hits it received 
in the past week.  If the information is available, an indented list of 
pages which contain links to the URL appears below it.

/~keeper (3 hits):
  http://www.washington.edu:1183/ (2)

/~keeper/ (3 hits):
  http://www.washington.edu:1183/ (2)

/~keeper/home-sample.html (1 hit):
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~bryan/index.hafh.html (1)

/~keeper/installs.html (3 hits):
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~keeper/keeper.html (1)

/~keeper/keeper.html (10 hits):
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~bryan/index.hafh.html (1)
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/csl/lab-staff.html (1)
  http://www.caltech.edu/people/www.html (1)

/~keeper/nopu.html (1 hit)

/~keeper/pictures/felix.gif (20 hits):
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~samuela/samuela.html (3)
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~pmd/pmd.html (2)
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~masse/masse.html (1)
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~brey/brey.html (4)
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~sbennett/sbennett.html (3)
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~kuong/kuong.html (2)
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~bryan/index.hafh.html (1)
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~fisch/sample.html (1)

/~keeper/server.html (11 hits):
  http://dpls.dacc.wisc.edu/web_talk.html (5)

/~keeper/todo.html (13 hits):
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~keeper/keeper.html (2)
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~keeper/ (2)

Note that the list of references includes the links from your own documents. This is intentional. Also note that adding up the hits on all the reference links will often yield a lower number than the total hit count of a page. This is because not all browsers send the URL for the refering page (referring links are a new feature of the HTTP protocol). Some referring pages may not contain links to the listed page. This can happen if the maintainer of the referring page removes the link, or more commonly if a user chose "Open" and entered the URL for your page while the referring page was loaded into their browser.

Please be careful not to overstate the importance of these numbers. If you wish to measure the success of your pages, the number of pages linking to it is probably a much better metric than the hit count. Remember, you get the hit before a user has even read the page.